Already established as an eminent writer on typography and a famous practitioner by the time he arrived at Penguin in 1946, Tschichold was more assertive at imposing his design philosophy than his predecessors.īefore his arrival the design of individual books had appeared cohesive, at least compared to those of rival publishers, but had varied with the views of the editor and printer. The enduring principles of Penguin’s design were defined by Allen Lane when he founded the company in the mid-1930s, but it was not until the late 1940s that it adopted a disciplined and coherent approach to design under Jan Tschichold. The company then strengthened its design ethos under the direction of the German typographer Jan Tschichold (1902-1974) during the 1940s and the Italian art director Germano Facetti (1926-2006) in the 1960s. The rigorous application of colour, grid and typography in those early paperbacks instilled Penguin with a commitment to design from the start. Considering illustrated book covers to be trashy, Lane insisted on his following a simple horizontal grid for Penguin’s jackets in colours that signified the genre of each book: orange for fiction, green for crime, and blue for biography. Young was then asked to design the covers of the first set of ten paperbacks to be published in summer 1935 including Ariel and A Farewell to Arms. Lane’s secretary suggested Penguin as a 'dignified, but flippant' name for the company and the office junior Edward Young was sent to sketch the penguins at London Zoo as its logotype. All he could find were reprints of 19th century novels and Lane decided to found a publishing house to produce good quality paperbacks sold at sixpence each, the same price as a packet of cigarettes. Returning to London from a weekend at the Devon home of the crime writer Agatha Christie in 1934, the publisher Allen Lane scoured Exeter Station for something to read. Under Jan Tschichold in the 1940s and Germano Facetti in the 1960s, Penguin became an exemplar of book design. When PENGUIN was founded in 1935 with the radical concept of producing inexpensive paperback editions of high quality books, it adopted an equally progressive approach to typography and cover design.
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