In addition to this website, The Art of Penguin Science Fiction is also examined in a series of articles in The Penguin Collector, the journal of the Penguin Collectors Society. The opening article spans the first twenty-five years of Penguin sf, from Samuel Butler's Erewhon in 1935 to Nigel Kneale's Quatermass trilogy in 1959–60, and features the classic Penguin covers of Edward Young, Jan Tschichold and Hans Schmoller. This sets the scene for the second article, which looks at the transition from typographical to pictorial covers and then to the Marber grid, while also going behind the scenes to uncover the background to the Penguin Science Fiction series and Brian Aldiss's tenure as series editor.

However, it is Germano Facetti's use of abstract and surrealist paintings as cover art that is one of the most intriguing aspects of the Penguin Science Fiction series. Why did he choose Max Ernst's The Eye of Silence for the cover of A Case of Conscience? And what led him from Ray Bradbury's collection of short stories to Ernst's Garden Aeroplane Trap, or the stories anthologised in More Penguin Science Fiction to a lithograph by the father of abstract art, Wassily Kandinsky?

The same goes for other titles in the series. What links Hal Clement's sf classic, Mission of Gravity, to the landscapes of Yves Tanguy, or the latter's Palace of Windowed Rocks to The Drowned World of J G Ballard? Likewise Roy Lewis's novel, The Evolution Man, published by Penguin in 1963 but paired with an avant-garde art journal that appeared in France thirty years earlier. The use of Paul Klee's Underwater Garden on the cover of The Dragon in the Sea may seem fairly self-explanatory, but a closer look at the story reveals a far deeper resonance with Facetti's choice of cover art.

Facetti's pairing of books and artworks set the sf series apart, and opened a fascinating new chapter for Penguin Books that was later continued in the Penguin Modern Classics. The linkage of contents to cover art was invariably subtle, often ingenious, and sometimes playful, as in the use of a painting by Pavel Tchelitchew on the cover of Harry Harrison's Deathworld. But what exactly is the connection? It is this that is explored in the second and third articles.

Facetti's use of modern art on Penguin's sf covers may well have been inspired by J G Ballard's early fiction which makes numerous references to paintings by the likes of Salvador Dalí, Max Ernst, René Magritte, Paul Delvaux, Giorgio de Chirico and Yves Tanguy. Ballard greatly admired these and other artists whose paintings sought to penetrate the workings of the subconscious mind, and in the early 1960s he set off after them, writing sf novels and short stories that rejected outer space in favour of what the English writer J B Priestley termed 'inner space'. This is not a physical space but 'the psychological space apparent in surrealist painting' as Ballard put it in his autobiography, Miracles of Life.

Ballard's use of surrealist paintings as signposts to inner space acquired its own mode of visual expression in the 1970s when Penguin reprinted Ballard's books with David Pelham's airbrushed artwork on the covers. For Pelham's iconic images capture inner space in its uniquely Ballardian form, and it is this that is explored in Landscapes From a Dream, an article published by the British Science Fiction Association in its magazine, Vector.

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