dystopia n a society that is dominated by a totalitarian or technological state. Now common in science fiction, two of the best-known examples are Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1932) and George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949).


As the Penguin Science Fiction series moved away from the Marber grid to the windowed black covers of 1966-67, so the mantle of modern art passed to Penguin Modern Classics. The series had been launched in 1961 for works of twentieth-century literature deemed to have acquired classic status, and the first two sf novels to be admitted were Brave New World and The Island of Doctor Moreau. The latter seemed a curious choice since it was not, strictly speaking, a twentieth-century novel and nor was it really a classic when compared to the three H G Wells titles more deserving of such status, namely The Invisible Man, The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds. Presumably Moreau was simply due for a reprint, and rebranding it as a classic was not going to harm sales.

The selection strategy was not the only curious thing about these early Modern Classics. With little, if any, consistent use of colour, the series was identified by the distinctive and somewhat quirky layout of its covers. This reinstated a division into horizontal bands with the author's name at the top, the title and artwork below it, and then the imprint, with the penguin logo housed in a rectangular box. It was not an unpleasant look, and if anything the use of line drawings and an antiquated typeface made the covers seem quaint, but it was a bit old-fashioned even for the early sixties. Facetti wanted to give them a more modern look, and a few years later he got his way, switching them over to a Marber-style grid on which he could continue as curator to Penguin's ever-growing, frequently fascinating, and often eclectic gallery of twentieth-century cover art. The Island of Doctor Moreau was dropped, but Brave New World rightfully remained and was joined by two of the other three great dystopian novels on Penguin's backlist (the exception was Jack London's The Iron Heel) along with a first appearance in Penguin of the Russian emigré Yevgeny Zamyatin's totalitarian nightmare, We.

The pairing of Huxley's Brave New World with the rivets, tubes and interchangeable machine parts of Fernand Léger's Mechanical Element was straightforward enough given Léger's misguided belief in the ability of the Machine Age to create a utopian society. Likewise Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, which retained the William Roberts painting that had first graced its cover three years earlier. But it was the reissue of David Karp's One that again revealed Facetti's genius. The cover brief had presented him with a challenge to "find a painting in which man is reduced to a mere unit" and his response was nothing short of inspired. For insofar as a book may be judged by its cover, the pairing of Karp's master- piece with People in the Sun by the American artist Edward Hopper, though perhaps equalled, has never been bettered.

The publication of One and We as Modern Classics coincided with Facetti's departure from Penguin in 1972. However, a footnote to Facetti's dystopian gallery was added in September 2008 with the appearance in Penguin's revamped Modern Classics list of Anthem, a 1938 novella by the Russian-born American philosopher and writer Ayn Rand >>