Look at your children / See their faces in golden rays / Don't kid yourself they belong to you / They're the start of a coming race ..... Homo sapiens have outgrown their use ..... You gotta make way for the Homo superior. — David Bowie, Oh! You Pretty Things (1971).


Germano Facetti's use of modern art on a Marber-style grid for the Penguin Modern Classics in the mid '60s and early '70s was continued by David Pelham, but eventually replaced by a new cover design in the early 1980s. The new design, by Pelham's successor as art director at Penguin, Cherriwyn Magill, abandoned any continuity with Facetti's Modern Classics in favour of an orange-and-white spine and white covers on which the artwork was inset and the text centred, with the penguin logo sheltering beneath an overarching series name.

The late 1980s saw another redesign and a change of name to Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics. The front cover was now given over entirely to the artwork, which was overlaid with a text box containing the author's name and title. The logo also floated over the artwork, though now in an eau de Nil roundel, with spines and back covers in the same colour.

Replacing David Pelham's famous "cog-eyed image" on the cover of A Clockwork Orange was never going to be easy, but a reissue in Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics attempted it with a photomontage that paid homage to Pelham's cover.

The new millennium brought another redesign and another change of name as the 'Twentieth-Century' label was dropped and the series became simply 'Penguin Classics' like its older sibling series of pre-twentieth-century literature. However, any confusion over which was which was avoided by their different cover treatments. A new art director, Pascal Hutton, commissioned the freelance designer Jamie Keenan to redesign the Modern Classics covers, and Keenan's use of silver spines and back covers – with a matching silver panel across the base of the front cover for the logo, author's name and title – was in strong contrast to the familiar black and cream livery of the older Classics.

The reissue of A Clockwork Orange as a Modern Classic moved away from the cogs and eyes of earlier covers to show a glass of "the old moloko" that Alex and his droogs drank each night in the Korova Milkbar prior to a bit of ultra-violence.

In 2004 a white band was introduced across the front covers, similar to the one now used on the Classics series following its redesign in 2003. It was a minor change but a considerable aesthetic improvement. By separating the artwork from the silver panel, the band avoided the kind of colour clashes seen on some of Keenan's earlier covers, above. The band was also used to restore the Modern Classics name and to relocate the logo, resulting in a crisper, fresher overall look.

The white band perhaps had its greatest impact on the cover of A Clockwork Orange. Uncoupled from the silver panel, the image becomes an artwork, and thus recalls a seminal piece of 1970s conceptual art by Michael Craig-Martin, who placed a glass of water on a shelf and used the idea of transubstantiation to argue that it was, in fact, An Oak Tree.

A Science Fiction Omnibus is a revised version of The Penguin Science Fiction Omnibus that was first published in 1973. It replaces fifteen of the original stories with nine new ones plus John Crowley's 1989 novella, Great Work of Time.

The Modern Classics cover design in use today was introduced in September 2007 and plays down the series name, which sits almost unnoticed in the lower left corner. With the exception of two white bands the artwork fills the entire cover, as if subscribing to the marketing mantra that nowadays image is everything. Or is it? For stamped across the artwork in a giant typeface are the author's name and title, and it is not clear if the text or image takes precedence.

The design is big, bold and brave, but it is not easy to get right. The artwork needs strong colours to bring it forward, although this can interfere with the typography, while the latter tends to obscure lighter images. This is perhaps most evident on the cover of A Clockwork Orange, where the artwork is all but lost beneath the author's name and title.

Spot the difference: at first glance the cover art on the 2008 reprint of A Science Fiction Omnibus is the same as the previous year's edition, but wait – who's turned the ship around?

Anthem tells the poetic and deeply moving story of Equality 7-2521 and his love for Liberty 5-3000 in a future totalitarian society of collectivism and the ineffable I. The novella may not have the literal weight of Rand's much longer and better known novels, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, but it is nonetheless a gem of sparkling beauty, made more so by Penguin's choice of cover art – a detail from The Sleeper by the Polish art deco painter Tamara de Lempicka.

David Bowie was the ideal alien to star in the 1976 film version of The Man Who Fell to Earth, given his prog rock renderings of science-fictional themes in the late '60s and early '70s such as Space Oddity, a song about a depressed astronaut called Major Tom that was played on BBC television during its coverage of the Apollo 11 moon landing in 1969. Bowie followed this in 1971-72 with songs such as Starman, Life on Mars? and Oh! You Pretty Things (his take on the rise of Homo superior), while the year after the cinema release of The Man Who Fell to Earth a photograph of Bowie as the film's eponymous alien was used on the sleeve of his 1977 album, Low.

The Man Who Fell to Earth is a superb novel that more than merits its Modern Classic status. Set over a five-year period from 1985 to 1990, it tells of an alien from the planet Anthea who travels to Earth on a mission to save his species from extinction, as water, fuel and other natural resources on his home planet are all but exhausted and fewer than three hundred Antheans remain alive. Masquerading as a human named Thomas Jerome Newton, the alien rapidly acquires enormous wealth which he uses to fund the project that will rescue the dying Antheans. But overcome by isolation and loneliness he suffers an existential crisis and gradually goes native, becoming psychologically more human than Anthean. In fact, as the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche once put it, he is all too human, as he sinks into alcoholism, abandons the project and records an album of poetry in his native language. Unintelligible to humans, it is an elegiac farewell to the Anthean race that is monitoring Earth's radio and television transmissions for news of the rescue mission.

A recurring metaphor throughout the book is that of another man who fell to earth, and two of the novel's three sections – Icarus Descending and Icarus Drowning – are named after him. In Greek mythology, Icarus and his father Daedalus attempt to escape from their imprisonment on the island of Crete using wings that Daedalus fashions from feathers held together with wax. Daedalus warns his son not to fly too close to the sun, but Icarus ignores his father and the sun melts the wax, his wings disintegrate, and he plunges into the sea. The novel contains numerous references to The Fall of Icarus, a painting formerly attributed to the sixteenth-century Flemish artist Pieter Brueghel the Elder, and given this linkage it is tempting to imagine how the book might have appeared if Penguin had published it in the 1960s... >>

It was widely reported in 2008 that the Hollywood director, Steven Spielberg, had acquired the rights to John Wyndham's Chocky, but no further news has emerged until recently, when Penguin announced it is reissuing the novel as a Modern Classic "to tie in with the release of the Steven Spielberg film". Meanwhile, the director himself remains curiously silent.