Welcome to The Art of Penguin Science Fiction where, one way or another, you have arrived at this introduction to a website that explores the history and cover art of science fiction published by Penguin Books from 1935 to the present day. But first of all some answers to the questions: why Penguin, and why science fiction?

Penguin Books was founded by Allen Lane in 1935 as a paperback imprint of The Bodley Head publishing house. The new venture was an immediate success and early the following year Penguin was established as a company in its own right. An important factor in this success was the books' eye-catching cover design which featured two horizontal bands of colour – orange for fiction, green for crime, blue for biography – separated by a third, white band containing the title and author's name. These simple yet striking covers gave the books a refreshing, modern look and remained in use for many years, acquiring iconic status along the way as examples of classic twentieth-century design.

This status was reaffirmed in 2009 when the UK's Royal Mail issued a commemorative set of ten stamps celebrating 'British Design Classics'. Among the designs chosen to appear on the stamps were the London Underground map, a Routemaster bus, a telephone box and the orange-and-white cover of a Penguin book.

So Penguin books and their iconic covers have a place in history that merits study and appreciation. They have influenced generations of readers and played an important role in our cultural heritage. Over the years new cover designs have appeared and in the 1950s a transition took place from typographical to pictorial covers. This was followed by the intro- duction of a radically new cover design in the 1960s, and the launch of a Penguin science fiction series with covers featuring reproductions of abstract and surrealist paintings.

This curious linkage of modern art and sf is at the heart of this website and is made more intriguing by the subtle and often ingenious connections between the artworks and the stories within. Following on from this, Penguin continued to publish sf as a number of mini-series, with covers that reveal the influence of Pop Art and to some extent Op Art. But to put these later developments in perspective it is necessary to go back to the first sf titles that Penguin published in the 1930s, for these early covers, now celebrated on a stamp, have come to be regarded as artworks in their own right.

Until recently the history of Penguin sf and its cover art has been largely overlooked. This website, along with a series of articles on the subject, attempts to rectify this. But what the articles convey with words this website does with images and thereby offers what words cannot: over 480 Penguin sf covers and the ability to trace their evolution at the click of a button as titles were reprinted and different covers came and went. As such this website complements the articles, which focus more on the science fiction and its linkage to each book's cover art. Here, however, it is the covers them- selves that light the way along the multiple paths that weave through the history, and art, of Penguin science fiction.

Publication Dates

The Penguin publication dates used on this website up to 1970 are taken from The Penguin Catalogue: A Complete Cata- logue of the Publications of Penguin Books, also known as Q100. An asterisk after the date indicates that it is later than the publication date given on the copyright page of the book itself, which was presumably published later than planned. Dates after 1970 are derived from various sources, such as the Penguin Archive held at the University of Bristol.

Further Reading

Penguin

William Emrys Williams. The Penguin Story, 1935-1956. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1956

Author/Title Title/Author Index. Harmondsworth: Penguin, October 1969

Linda Lloyd Jones and Jeremy Aynsley. Fifty Penguin Years. London: Penguin, 1985

Phil Baines. Penguin by Design: A Cover Story, 1935-2005. London: Penguin, 2005

Steve Hare and Phil Baines (Eds). Penguin by Designers. London: Penguin Collectors Society, 2007

Science Fiction

Kingsley Amis. New Maps of Hell. New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co, 1960 >>

Brian Aldiss. Billion Year Spree: The History of Science Fiction. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1973

Janet Sacks (Ed). Visions of the Future. London: New English Library, 1976

Edward James. Science Fiction in the Twentieth Century. Oxford University Press, 1994

John Clute. Science Fiction: The Illustrated Encyclopedia. London: Dorling Kindersley, 1995

Penguin Science Fiction

Aune R Butt. 'The Artist in Science Fiction.' Science Fiction Monthly, September 1974 >>

James Pardey. 'The Art of Penguin Science Fiction.' The Penguin Collector, December 2008 >>

—. 'The Art of More Penguin Science Fiction.' The Penguin Collector, June 2009 >>

—. 'The Art of Yet More Penguin Science Fiction.' The Penguin Collector, December 2009 >>

—. 'Landscapes From a Dream.' Vector Magazine, Autumn 2009 >>

—. 'Penguin Book Covers: Franco Grignani.' Creative Review, April 2011 >>