after prufrock

1935: Office junior Edward Young spends the day at London Zoo sketching penguins at every angle possible. The idea of the penguin was inspired by the contemporary German publishing house The Albatross Library, and it’s successful paperback design followed closely. Young sets the standards for early Penguin with the classic three-band cover, the simple yet deft Gill Sans typeface and the efficient colour coding scheme (orange for fiction, green for crime, blue for biography). Young was also responsible for the early marketing of the popular paperbacks, hooking onto the equation of the original cover price of 6d (pennies) as equivalent to the cost of ten cigarettes. In an era where paperback literature was only available with luridly illustrated covers and often bad quality fiction, the affordable penguins reeled in the masses with their smart design and sound choice of texts.

Upcoming Chapter: Penguin Composition Rules & and the Tschichold redesign.