Penguin's Great Ideas
The Orlando Sentinel column Shakespeare’s Coffee notes:
A year ago, Penguin publishing came out with the Great Ideas series, inexpensive paperbacks featuring some of the most significant ideas, essays and philosophies just made for reading in a conspicuous public area and looking cool.
Yesterday, Penguin released the second batch of books from the series, which features a nice array of titles including Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Women, Plato’s The Symposium, Francis Bacon’s Of Empire, Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s The Social Contract (ooo! French Revolution!), existentialist philosopher Soren Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling and more. We’ll kindly ignore the “so over it” inclusion of Sun Tzu’s The Art of War.
This is actually a quasi-review, though: You don’t need me to tell you things like “Wollstonecraft’s essay on the inequality of the sexes is still as relevant today as it was when it was first published.” Rather, I like the idea of this series. […]
Besides, I’ve got a major yen for the Great Ideas book design — simple black-and-white with blue spot color and classic illustration, very old-school book style.
So, my question is, do you agree about the covers? Here’s an example:
Hmmmm. I like, but not thrilled. What do you think?
I’ll be away from the computer again this weekend, working on a photography project. Please forgive the lack of comment moderation until late Sunday night. Thanks. Have a great weekend!
Comments:
Looks like they’re harking back to the earliest Penguin cover by Jan Tschichold (I think I saw some similar work in a Print magazine article but I can’t find it now). I don’t know how well this would work in a bookstore, but it certainly evokes “classic.”
I’m a philosophy major, so I read a lot of these authors anyway. Compared to the covers I’m used to seeing, this is way prettier.
Still, I think it looks like the back of a playing card. Not in a bad way, just in an, “eh, nothing really grabs me” way.
A screenshot does absolutely no justice to the Great Ideas series books. These books are really a tactile experience…smooth matte paper with embossing. Feels like a letterpress. Not all superfluous, because great ideas SHOULD feel good.
I totally like it. After all that’s what Penguin wants to convery in these books: we’re publishing great old books back again.
To me it works just fine.
You really need to see this in the flesh, so to speak. The covers are beautiful to touch - the stock, the letterpress-like effect of the text, the colours. They’re lovely. I’ve bought a whole bunch of them.
I would have to see them in person, but they look cheap in the same way that Dover Books publications look cheap. Me no like.
I agree with the positives above - it really is about the feel of them. I bought one of the first series on impulse; I’d say the reason was 60/40 between the content and the cover… in favour of the cover.
The covers in the first series reflected printing processes and styles of the time in which the original text was printed: hence Orwell’s Why I write set in Gill Sans, with three vertical (rather than Tschichold’s horizontal) stripes; Darwin’s On Natural Selection with restrained Victorian typography with an overly-decorative border, and so on.
This also seems to apply to the second series – the cover of Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus is set at 45°, reflecting Modernist principles; Sun Tzu’s The Art of War is set vertically, reflecting Chinese printing and reading.
And of course, as others have already mentioned, there is the tactility of the covers – many of which have been embossed to accentuate the ‘crafted’ feel. Add this to David Pearson’s typography and you have an elegant forty books…
Have to agree with most of the above - the covers are indeed a tactile experience, and not well served by photographic reproduction. I worked on one of the covers for this series, and one for the last series, and can only say that I’m ridiculously proud of them. They leap out at you in a book store, standing out from everything around them. All credit to David Pearson, who really is a genius.