After years and years of doggedly collecting what are commonly called “Green Penguins,” a series of hundreds of crime novels published with green covers by the UK publisher Penguin in the 1960s, I’ve both mounted an exhibition of the collection, and created a zine that documents the history of the books, their design, and the designers that made them. The content in the zine is an expansion and re-crafting of the writing I did about these books here, on the Justseeds blog, for my old Judging Books By Their Covers series (you can read those HERE).
I’ve made a short video of the zine, which is 4 spot color printed on risograph:
I’m quite proud of the zine, and excited to share it. I think it’s both a great read, and an introduction to one of these lost corners of modernist design.
And it comes with a double-sided grid posters of all the covers! Check the zine out HERE.
The exhibition was held at Tomorrow Today, a very cool art & politics bookshop that recently opened in Philly. We filled a room with paperbacks, and have been selling them off the walls. The installation is still up, so if you are in Philly, check it out!
Let me know what you think!
would love to order this but shipping to Canada or Netherlands doubles the cost
Yeah, the cost of international postage has gone haywire over the past decade. Maybe there are some local shops that could order wholesale and stock it, which would make it cheaper? Send along any ideas!
This was simple genius: The trade dress alone tells you what genre and kind of book one was looking at.
May be apples and oranges but I’m not sure the early Penguin paperbacks weren’t the best designed book line ever.
Totally, Penguin made some smart decisions early one, from trusting their designers to conceptualizing books as part of a broader conception of being well read, rather than simply a random collection of individual titles.