In early 1984 Penguin sent out a promotional booklet informing retailers that fantasy and science fiction were 'no longer specialist areas of freakish interest' and listing some of the titles that Penguin would release over the next year or so. The booklet also announced the launch of a Penguin fanzine, ZONE-SF and Fantasy News, which would appear three times a year as an insert in various UK comics and teen magazines such as Kerrang! and 2000 AD. For sf this was a younger target audience than usual, although no less 'eager to snap-up new products' as the booklet put it.

This view of books as products and, by implication, covers as packaging had led to David Pelham's resignation as art director in 1979 and its effect on the sf titles released in 1983-87 can be seen below. The covers are clearly aimed at a young market but there is no consistency from one to the next and nothing to identify them as Penguin books except the logo. The assumption was that younger readers were not interested in who the publisher was, and based their buying decisions on the story alone, hence the showy covers and super-sized titles.

This outbreak of so-called 'selling covers' and more aggressive, targeted marketing went beyond sf to much of the popular fiction that Penguin was publishing, and while such covers caught the eye, to many people it was for the wrong reasons. For a start they made the books look cheap – something Allen Lane had been determined to avoid when he founded Penguin back in 1935 – and as the company's fiftieth anniversary approached, this apparent drop in design standards seemed like a betrayal of its founder's ideals, a move down-market aimed at shifting more 'product'.

It would be easy to conclude that Penguin had sold its soul and was now simply in it for the money, but things were not so straightforward. In part it was a response to the demands of wholesalers and other large outlets whose stack 'em high and sell 'em cheap approach to bookselling was later to become a familiar sight. But with fierce competition from other publishers, it was also a question of the company's survival and to Penguin's Chief Executive, Peter Mayer, that meant profitability. As Phil Baines notes in Penguin by Design: 'While many will argue that, from a design point of view, Mayer's era marks the all-time low in quality at Penguin, that opinion obscures the fact that, while the company made a loss of £242,000 in 1979, it made a £5.64 million profit only three years later'. Aesthetics aside, Mayer was simply doing his job.

This unabashed pursuit of profit and outpouring of mass-market covers was not all bad. The 1984 reprint of The Space Merchants works nicely as packaging and cover art, but its depiction of a futuristic agora is spoiled by the typography stamped obliquely across it. The exaggerated perspective of this deserted square, with its bust in a bra and other strange statuary, is a pastiche of paintings by the founder of metaphysical art, Giorgio de Chirico.

"They made a mistake ... and a nightmare began," says the strapline, where "They" are presumably the people at Penguin for publishing this trash by science fiction's most cantankerous author.