The Drought, 1968; design by Richard Hollis, photography by Dr. J Comroe.
James Pardey contacted me earlier this week announcing his site devoted to Penguin Books’ science fiction covers. I posted some of my own dishevelled copies a while back and this news gives me an excuse to throw up another Ballard cover. Pardey’s site is just the kind of thing I enjoy seeing, with a comprehensive collection and detailed notes for each design. The front page is especially good since you can see immediately how the look of the titles evolved, from spare layouts and pictorial covers through to bold graphic design which culminates in David Pelham’s great run as designer during the 1970s. Creative Review posted a talk Pelham gave a couple of years ago which explores his work at Penguin and touches on the covers he did for Ballard. A shame they didn’t do a complete set of Ballard’s titles at the time, I’d have loved to see how he treated the other books.
Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The book covers archive
Previously on { feuilleton }
• Penguin Labyrinths and the Thief’s Journal
• Penguin Surrealism
• Penguin book covers
John,
have you seen this flickr set :
“Classic records lost in time and format, re-emerged as Pelican books. Just for fun.”
http://tinyurl.com/c32xgo
fab attention to detail … and a great idea!
mr.K
Yes, I did see those, noticed them on a couple of design blogs. I should have mentioned them here, really. Sometimes when I see something linked a few places elsewhere I tend to think that everyone has seen it.
In a similar vein there’s MS Corley’s redesign of the Harry Potter books.
Oh yes I’d just seen those Harry Potter books also. Its funny how some things just seem to pop up all over the place on-line.
I loved that page of penguin covers. Thanks for sharing that.
If you look on Mr Corley’s other pages you’ll see he’s done some equally inventive covers for His Dark Materials and others.