Prior to his departure in 1949, Jan Tschichold had been working on a new idea for Penguin fiction covers which rotated the horizontal banding of Edward Young's design through ninety degrees and reduced the width of the two orange bands. Young's horizontal division into three sections did not disappear completely, but the upper and lower sections were much smaller than before and demarcated only by a black line, with the vertical orange and white bands extending the full height of the cover. PENGUIN BOOKS remained in the topmost section, though now without its large white quartic, while the price displaced the penguin logo in the centre of the lower section. The logo itself was relocated to a small white roundel halfway down the cover in the right-hand orange band.

The changes created a much larger space in the centre of the cover, which could now accommodate some promotional blurb in addition to the title and author's name. The design was completed by Tschichold's replacement, Hans Schmoller, and sf titles began using the new cover in the mid-1950s, starting, as before, with Erewhon.

Brave New World was part of a set of ten Huxley titles that appeared in April 1955. The covers were conspicuous for their use of a new typeface for the title and author's name, and for the fact that there was no promotional blurb, the impression being that none was needed since Huxley's name alone was enough to make the books essential reading.

The Death of Grass re-examines the ethical consequences of crop failure and global famine explored by J J Connington in Nordenholt's Million, although the two books soon part company, with Christopher's descending into cold-blooded murder.

The blurb on the cover of The Seeds of Time mistakenly announced "nine fantastic stories" instead of ten. The error was corrected for the 1962 reprint, though by then the blurb had shifted to the back cover.

When One was first published it had been bracketed with Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, Huxley's Brave New World and Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon. It was a claim the literary critic Cyril Connolly, writing in The Sunday Times, "at first thought presumptuous; but now, after reading it, I am inclined to agree". Like its predecessors, Karp's novel bore the hallmarks of a classic. A note in the Penguin editorial file summed it up by asking "What would happen if everyone thought alike, if all were members of a vast, harmonious society where all are equal, all conform? Can an intelligent man be stifled of his personality? Must the abstraction of the State extort the final sacrifice from its members?".

Limbo '90 was the last Penguin sf title to use a purely typographic cover and the first, according to the blurb on the back, to project the concept of cybernetics "to its logical and terrifying conclusion". Whoever wrote this had evidently not read the book, which is set in the wake of a third world war waged between two supercomputers and has young men flocking to join a global pacifist movement by volunteering to have their limbs amputated and thereby 'immobilise' their aggressive impulses. This conceit is, of course, a pun on the idea of disarmament, and Wolfe's penchant for wordplay litters the text like so many dropped clues. The intention is neither logical nor terrifying but that of a ludicrous satire, as emphasised by the fact that most amputees are fitted with prosthetic arms and legs that give them superhuman abilities far beyond the limbs they've lopped off. It is nonsense dressed up as a mock Hegelian dialectic on the passive-aggressive, a sheep in Wolfe's clothing, a bad joke masquerading as a mix of crackpot philosophy and psychoanalytical claptrap. It only makes sense if read as nonsense, but even so the book is far too long and once its point is made the joke wears thin. It would have been better as a novella and Penguin, perhaps realising this, published an abridged edition.