Following the panic of '68, Penguin's new art director for fiction, David Pelham, commissioned the Italian graphic designer, Franco Grignani, to produce a set of sixteen covers for an sf mini-series which appeared in 1969-70.

Grignani was a leading figure in the field of experimental photography, with a career stretching back some forty years to his early work with photograms. From this he progressed to a range of techniques based on standard photography which he then projected and distorted using lenses, shards of glass, pieces of broken mirror, or liquids such as oil and water.

The images such techniques produce are beautifully represented by Grignani's designs for the sf series, which reinstated the black covers Alan Aldridge had introduced in '66, along with the sf label which the panic tops of '68 had overlooked.

Grignani's black covers and single-colour images form a kaleidoscope of shimmering dreams and shattered nightmares. They are like a free association of thoughts mapped out in watery reflections that briefly coalesce and then disperse, leaving memories of figures trapped in the fragments of a looking-glass. They hint at other dimensions and warped worlds where space swims and time shudders. Viewed as a set they would not look out of place if framed and hung on the walls of an art gallery. The thought of sixteen black spines lined up on a bookshelf seems somewhat prosaic by comparison.

Grignani also collaborated with fellow Italian Francesco Saroglia on the design of the black-and-white Woolmark logo, an Op Art-inspired image of a ball of wool which on closer inspection is a threefold Möbius strip. The logo was launched in 1964 and remains one of the world's most recognisable trademarks to this day.