The Penguin Blog

Around the World in 80 Books: the third leg

Again, thank you for all your suggestions. Although I haven't taken up all of them, they are grist to my plodding-route mill and spark off many ideas (as well as bulking up my Amazon wishlist). I think I've got a fairly clear route of where I'm going to go in Europe now, and I think I can even begin to see glimmers of another continent. Hurray! Although I'll regret saying that when all the bedding looks funny and I'm forced to eat three meals a day at McDonald's just to feel like I recognise something.

Third stop: SWITZERLAND! More specifically, Lake Geneva

Book: Hotel du Lac, by Anita Brookner

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I have to confess, I'd never read any Brookner before. I think I'd dismissed her as a bit wimmin-y, and although there's the odd phrase here or there that reads a bit heavily-autobiographically, the whole book is neat, and light, and captures perfectly both the sadness of out-of-season resorts and the weight of one's baggage when one flees heartache. Edith Hope, a romantic novelist, has been ordered to Switzerland by her loved ones after a 'shocking' romantic indiscretion. Poor Edith, constantly reminding us that she's been compared aesthetically to Virginia Woolf, is shipped off, carrying her feelings like precious eggs, tuning them constantly but never really examining them, so certain is she of what kind of life she has agreed to.

Although not hugely, uniquely Swiss, I think this conjures up that cold, clear, medicinal travel that only autumn in that kind of place can provide - and I loved Edith's wit, and her sense: in another lifetime, she might have been Elinor Dashwood (and ended up with Hugh Grant SQUEEAAAL). The recognition of her hotel room decor as "veal-coloured" is something that made me snigger out loud on the Tube, and her overactive imagination (and subsequent disappointment) as she views each fellow-guest is something so sadly recognisable.

Earns extra Swiss points by having one character eat lots of delicacies from the Patisserie.

Conclusions as a traveller:

Don't bring your dog to Switzerland. They hate dogs. And probably don't bring your daughter, either.

Right, next stop, Germany. Now these guys are seriously witty, so I am bracing my ribs for some first-class tickling. Please keep the suggestions coming in - although I do have a German book in mind, I'm a bit scared of it.

Sam the Copywriter

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How to Sell Books in a Recession

In one of the darkest years of the 1930s depression, Allen Lane founded Penguin with the -- then groundbreaking -- notion to sell quality writing as cheaply as a pack of cigarettes and to sell them everywhere.

Studying our own history gives us pause for thought as we tip headfirst into recession: bleak economic times are sometimes the crucible of inspiration and creativity. I think of the black box theatres so beloved of Peter Brook and endless student productions, in which limited resources became the spur to imagination. And I compare that to a particularly bloated production I once saw where just one effect must have cost thousands of pounds, scores of unionised man-hours and added precisely nothing of meaning or value to the piece.

When I say we're ready and inspired to take the challenge of an economic downturn, I don't just mean cutting a few long lunches, but having a vision and being fleet of foot enough to respond to changing market conditions. Historically, the publishing industry thrives on such challenges. I think I've said in a previous blog that for an "old" industry, we're pretty responsive and innovative. We have to be.

Our customers are still there and a book remains fantastic value for money. Apparently at such times we skew more toward escapist fare, rather like the cinema goers in the 30s flocked to gangster films, musicals and screwball comedies. When the Canary Wharf Waterstones opened the day after the collapse of Lehman Bros, the first two books to be sold were books on spirituality. Another huge growth area is teenage fiction thanks to the Harry Potter effect on our growing kids, with help from teenage vampires in Twilight and teenage fathers in Nick Hornby's Slam. The common wisdom is that this mortgage-free demographic market's disposible income remains relatively unaffected, although books compete for it with games and music. People will also still buy books for their kids. The success of Ascent of Money, Black Swan and The Great Crash 1929 shows that those books helping us understand what's happening are also flying out the door.

So what are we worried about?

In short, it might not be our readers, but our retailers.

The once mighty high street has been fighting competition from online and supermarkets for a few years, but when every day another high street name goes into administration, we have to assess the risk. When a company goes into administration, the independent administrators sell off as many assets as possible, paying off debts in order of priority. If we have lots of stock sitting in a customer's warehouse or on their shelves, we first have to prove to the administrators that we supplied it, rather than a third party wholesaler, and then once that value is assessed, we may only be awarded pence in the pound. So a retailer going under is bad news for its suppliers.

There is a theory that in these times it's best to be very big so you can take a hit like the one I've described, or to be very small, so you can turn on a dime in response to tricky market conditions. Each of our retailers needs a strategy to suit these times as much as we do: whether it's negotiating down rents and utilities, increasing margin on every book sold, increasing marketing income, consolidating roles, departments or even outlets, making cost savings in the supply chain, and so on. That can make for even tougher negotiations between publishers and retailers, but it's not the only game in town. How do we get back to creativity and innovation? How do we as publishers and retailers inspire our customers to buy books?

Peter Brook felt passionately that a theatre of more limited means helped to bring theatre-makers and their audiences into a closer rapport. The stage is bare. Enter an actor and a book.

Fiona Buckland
Sales Manager

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Stamps, submarines and snooping around

I love stamps. I'll admit it - a lot of my childhood was spent hanging out with albums and sticky hinges. I'll get to the main point of this post in a moment, but first, let's do my geeky younger self a favour and show a few beauties from my early years. Happily, this also serves to illustrate the fact that stamps are great design objects.

So when Penguin made it onto a stamp alongside other British Design Classics such as Harry Beck's London Underground map and a Routemaster bus, it was an honour for Penguin, underlining once again its part in this country's great
design heritage.

I found that the book featured on the stamp was just hanging out on my art director's desk. So I thought I'd do a spot of investigating and ask the stamp designer about how he
choose which book to feature on the stamp. If you ever saw
me on the blog before being interviewed, its all changed...
The interviewed becomes the interviewer, hahaha.

I went ahead and asked my question to Pierre Vermeir the creative director of HGV who designed all 10 stamps and he said this:

"The first selection was drawn from the list of the first twenty paperbacks published by Penguin featuring the classic design grid. We looked at all of them in terms of colour to compliment the rest of the stamps. The final choice was a female author
as the majority of the icons featuring on the stamps have been designed by men, our client thought this was right and so
did we."

The decision to feature a female author for reasons of balance is an interesting one. It's thoughtful and shows attention to detail. Of course, the fact that such lengths were necessary in order to bolster the female representation - of the ten design icons featured on the stamps, only Mary Quant's mini skirt is credited to a woman - tells its own story about the design industry in the twentieth century. That's a subject for another day, but for now, back to Vermeir's elegantly designed stamps, of which in case there is any doubt, I shall declare myself a fan. Setting the credits in Gill Sans - the same typeface used on the featured Penguin cover, and a British design classic in itself - is another nice touch.

I particlarly like the fact that Edward Young gets the credit he deserves for the classic tri-band Penguin design, and that the stamp features a Young cover from before the design received its makeover from Jan Tschichold. Young, who famously drew the penguins at London Zoo when designing the logo, has been rather overshadowed by Tshishold in design history, so it's nice to see his efforts recognised here.

So this weekend I was visiting Thorpeness, and in my usual trawl of junk shops the perfect book seemed to be waiting for my arrival. One of Our Submarines, written by Edward Young himself, was granted the honour of being Penguin number 1000. (I bought it for the design connection, but am now reading all about life in a submarine, which is a good deal more intriguing than I initially imagined.) The back blurb recounts Young's contribution to Penguin design hisory, and goes on to say that, after the war, he became director in charge of production and design for a new publishing firm established by Rupert Hart-Davis. A quick bit of research says that Hart-Davis's books were famously well designed. I expected nothing less. So now I am off to hunt down some of these beauties to judge for myself.

 

Penguin is very proud to be on such a prestigious set of stamps. Thanks to all the people involved who thought us worthy to hang out alongside something as exciting as Concorde among other greats.

Coralie Bickford-Smith
Senior Designer

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What Sport (Writing) Tells Us About Life (and People)

I’m a fairly bookish person, I think. I’ve always been an avid reader, at school and at college; I did English Lit at university; I worked in a bookshop during said university time; I’ve talked passionately with friends and colleagues about books, stories, poems and graphic novels I’ve loved; I get flustered when someone disagrees with me about a book or author I admire; and now I work in publishing, for some very good, literary imprints.

I’m also a lover of sports. Football and tennis mainly, but if there’s a major occasion going down I want in on the preferably widescreen action: Rugby World Cup? Ashes? Olympics? Man, oh man. Bring. It. On. The number of man-hours I’ve spent recently checking whether Arsenal have actually bought Andrei Arshavin must run into the… well, let’s avoid career suicide and just say I’ve checked a fair bit. And I’ve got lots of bookish friends who also love sport, and have never felt the two were a clash. 

However, some of my bookish friends who don’t like sport have a ‘never the twain shall meet’ attitude about it all. Sport is a realm of hooligans, loud and unpleasant noises, fighting, drinking, and ugly, ugly people. No one civilised could possibly enjoy such things: what’s all this running about? Why is that man chasing that man with the round thing next to his foot? Why do these people seem to hate each other? Where’s the story? Why does anyone care? And why is everyone so shouty? To these people, writing intelligently about sport must be anathema. If the thing itself isn’t much cop, intellectually or morally what can any writing on the subject bring to it? 

Aside from some obvious answers, such as how a study into the history of league football in England can highlight some important social, financial and political facts, there’s a lot to be gained in literary terms from looking at the actions of a game, the theory behind a training regime or even the philosophy behind a moment on the pitch, tennis court or baseball diamond. I’m not being at all original when I say that sport is all about little narratives; moments of heightened drama that, in microcosm, reflect the drama of everyday life. It’s the world writ large over a small space of time, on a small stage, right in front of you. Remember the recent Wimbledon men’s final? If you saw it you will and it’s a perfect example. It had everything: a great champion and a young upstart challenger; an unexpected beginning; a comeback to rival all comebacks; it had all the twists and turns of a world-class thriller or action movie; and it had an outcome that turned the tennis world on its head, utterly captivated and divided the watching crowd and millions at home, and, quite frankly, kept me up all that night.

And if the events themselves weren’t stirring enough, writing on the subject has been and is practised by some of the finest wordsmiths in the business. Anyone read Norman Mailer's The Fight? Or William Hazlitt’s essay of the same name? Camus was a semi-professional goalkeeper before he became a philosopher/novelist/20th century intellectual icon, after all – he was even capped for Algeria. Simon Barnes of The Times is one of the absolute best in the business. To prove it, here’s a selection of his columns. I challenge you not to find something in there that makes you think about sport in a new way. The late, great and much-lamented David Foster Wallace wrote an awesome essay on Roger Federer (come on Rog! You can get back to number 1!) for the NY Times not too long ago. It’s called ‘Roger Federer as Religious Experience’: do you need any more proof that serious writers can find serious topics and, most importantly, unearth genuine revelations from the practice of sports writing?

*sighs*…makes me glad to be alive…

You do? Well, handily, I’ve got the book for you. Ed Smith's What Sport Tells Us About Life is a brilliant, timely, witty and, yes, deeply intelligent look at what lessons can be learned from the world of sport. It’s full of the stuff sporting arguments and discussions are made of. Why did Zidane headbutt Materazzi at the end of the World Cup Final? What part does luck play in a professional’s career? When can talent become a curse? Ed’s musings on such questions have drawn enormous praise. Nick Hornby said ‘I could eat this stuff up with a spoon’; Mark Lawson said the book was ‘recommended to anyone interested in sport, history or simply human nature’; Stephen Frears (yes, Stephen The Queen Frears!) called it ‘a tremendous book’; Simon Barnes (we love you, Simon!) says to you (yes, you: don’t look at anyone else): ‘DON’T MISS IT’. It’s out in paperback on January 29^th so there’s no excuse.

If it’s good enough for Simon (and Stephen and Nick and Mark), it’s good enough for me. And if you’re still not convinced about sport and it’s still not good enough for you, it’ll certainly be good enough for that person you know who has seen the light and goes to work every morning wondering what it would be like to score a winning goal in a World Cup Final. Or is that one really and truly just me?

Joe
Literary Publicity

Bookcamped

In the end there was a little less hacking, printing, soldering or coding than I might have hoped for, but the conversations, discussions and presentations that took place at Saturday's Bookcamp confirmed that people think that the time is right for some seriously bookish experimentation.

As Russell Davies blogged last week, the book isn't going away any time soon, but the business models associated with publishing are being vigorously challenged and excitingly (and challengingly for traditional publishers) the means to produce, promote and distribute books are  become available to anyone with an idea or story and access to the internet.

At Bookcamp a mixture of technologists and publishing types (and the odd publishing technologist) considered a good number of these challenges and opportunities. We thought about what publishers and authors might be able to sell if the book ceases to be an artefact. Whether good design can save the book from the online onslaught and whether good design can be built into digital products. We wondered how books can be turned into social objects, retaining the memory of who read them and how these readers had responded to the text.

In a week when it was revealed, to much astonishment, that the amount of time Americans spend reading literature has actually increased in recent years, Bookcampers asked how we might pass on an enthusiasm for reading to children, digital natives growing up with an (over)abundance of entertainment options. And there was a terrific brainstorming session on how an after-school literacy initiative based on the 826 Valencia model might be established on these shores.

All in all, it was a stimulating day which to me demonstrated that the geeks are not out to destroy the book or replace The Great Gatsby with Grand Theft Auto as an paragon of narrative. But equally clear are the challenges that face publishers who traditionally know only how to publish and market traditional printed books in the traditional way. The worlds of reading and books are changing - publishers like Penguin need to keep on learning new tricks while we continue to tweak our old ones.

Thanks to everyone who came and contributed - let's try and continue our conversations and experiments in the comments below or on the wiki.

Jeremy Ettinghausen, Digital Publisher

PS We're going to try and compile blog posts, photos, reports and other notes from the day into a print-on-demand edition with the working title The Big Bookish Book of Bookcamp - more on this soon.

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Around the World in 80 Books: the second leg

Goodness. Thanks for all your suggestions for the next leg of my journey; who knew there were so many literary types out there? Just to clarify the rules for those of you who didn't understand my convoluted and none-too-clear explanations:

1. I can only travel between countries that share a border (Poland-Belarus, or Libya-Egypt, or Mongolia-China). I cannot go UK-Nigeria. Sorry, Sonja.

2. I can cross bodies of water, but only really the shortest possible routes. So I could just about go Canada-Japan, or Brazil-Nigeria (see, Sonja, I am trying to get it in there), but not really UK-Finland (handling that boat is not something I'd be too confident of) or Mauritania-India (out-and-out cheating).

3. Each book doesn't have to contain a journey to the next destination. That would be amazing, but perhaps a little beyond my current intellectual budget right now.

So, here we go.

Second stop: "Bailleville" and "Sainte Agathe", France

Book: Gemma Bovery, by Posy Simmonds, and Le Grand Meaulnes, by Alain-Fournier 

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I don't know why I chose such sad books. I know Bonjour Tristresse isn't exactly Cold Comfort Farm, but at least it's got some sunlight in it. Anyway, I'd read both of these before and thought I could do with a reminder of how brilliant they were. And they were. Brilliant.

Gemma Bovery is a graphic novel inspired by Madame Bovary, about a chubby Englishwoman who moves to Normandy with her furniture restorer husband, but swiftly tires of the day-to-day nosiness of French village life and the quiet of the life she's chosen. The narrator, a local baker, is fascinated by Gemma from the first time he sees her, and keeping a neighbourly eye on all her affaires (as well as her affairs) he becomes convinced that she's heading for the same sticky end as her namesake.

It's a book I would recommend to anybody, not least for Simmonds's immaculate drawings and her perfect ear for the Englishman/woman in France. Hilarious, clever, and a page-turner. Just perfect. And nowhere near as bleak as I've somehow insinuated.

Le Grand Meaulnes I think I've talked about before. It's a book I tend only to talk about in writing, rather than out loud, as my mother (a Frenchwoman, for her sins) will do that insanely rude French thing of making you repeat the words seven or eight times until they are satisfied that their language has not been entirely sullied by the silly English. In revenge, I tend to refer to it as 'The Big Meaulnes' (as in Lebowski, or even - pushing the literary reference here - Gatsby); I imagine to avoid just such a discussion, the recent translation was rechristened The Lost Estate. Most civilised.

This is a book about a schoolmaster's son, Francois, who always seemed a bit Tiny Tim-ish to me, and the influence the new boy, Augustin Meaulnes, holds over him. Meaulnes is a charismatic, confident older boy, who one day, through some mcguffin, finds himself in a strange house where a strange wedding party is taking place, seemingly arranged solely by a band of children. He falls in love with a beautiful girl there, but the party is rudely cut short when the master of the house returns without his bride.

Returning to school, he is haunted not only by the girl, but also by the house. Desperate to find it again, he plans all through the winter to make his way back to it, piecing together maps to calculate where he must have been.

To make a long story short, this is a really sad book. I actually can't get across how strong the urge was to just lie down and stare at nothing, after reading the final sentence. Ouch. It's beautiful, though, and again, I think everyone should read this. But maybe not on their wedding day. Or when their first child has just been born. Or if they've been befriending any bandaged gypsy acting troupes.

Conclusions as a traveller:

Fry-ups seem a lot less lethal than the local cuisine; never, ever, ever play truant (unlikely to be useful advice if you're just passing through for the fortnight).

I would quite like to go to Italy next, but I could go via Switzerland - any suggestions? I also have Blindness pencilled in for Portugal, but simply can't think of a Spanish book that I'd like to read. Mayday.

I think you've all earned a point so far, so the competition continues,

Sam the Copywriter

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Supercharged

It's quite hard to know what to expect from Bookcamp which is now only a few days away. Publishing conferences (this is not one of them) are often quite dry events - 'Supercharging Content Acquisition and Productivity for Publishers', anyone? - and a lot of the real action takes place outside the conference room in nearby corridors, bars and hotel lobbies. The only time I've seen someone demo something that they had actually made at a publishing conference, they got a standing ovation.

At Bookcamp we're hoping to see lots of things people have made or hear them discuss what they might like to make in the future. I'm looking forward to following discussions about how we get children hooked on reading, hearing about authors' fear of the internet and learning why everything on the internet is the opposite of how it is in print! And I'm excited to meet some new people who share an interest in and passion for books and stories and, yes, technology.

But most of all I'm looking forward to being surprised on the day. It's a day of bookish experimentation and we're going to find out what happens when a bunch of smart, creative, enthusiastic people get together to think about how we might save, repair, rethink and rebuild the book for the 21st century. I can't wait.

Jeremy Ettinghausen, Digital Publisher

PS Please note that because of space restrictions we can't accept any more attendees but we'll report back here soon after the event and perhaps even try our hand at custom, print-on-demand publishing to produce a record of the day.

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Join us: Around the World in 80 Books

Since that pram in the hallway is now blocking my path to good art, I find the airport's an even trickier destination. Thus it is that I begin a new journey, one that will take me around the world without ever forcing me to leave the comfort of my desk/bed/bath/tube seat. Ah, glorious. I will be aiming to travel around the world in eighty books (approximately) and will be needing your help to do so.

Here are the rules:

1. I can travel only between countries that share a border, or are either side of a body of water that needs crossing. Thus, I could go England-France-Spain-Portugal-Morocco-USA, but not Japan-Mongolia-Finland. I'm sorry if you could all work that out that without having to refer to a map - geography is unfortunately my Achilleus' heel.

2. The suggested book can be set in the country, set in one city of that country, or even set in space but by a famous author from that country. Translations get bonus points, but not if they are so complex that my eyes start revolting. And I'd prefer fiction, but if pushed will do the odd non-fiction.

3. Hopefully that's it. More rules may appear should I find the current ones make this as much effort as stressful real travel.

So, let us begin.

First stop: "The marshes" and London, England

Book: Great Expectations, by Charles Dickens

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It turns out that watching The Muppet Christmas Carol doesn't count as having read Dickens. Jumping into this tome, however, I discover that Dickens is hilarious. How is this for the best set of opening lines on the subject of the main character's name ever*:

"My father's family name being Pirrip, and my christian name Philip, my infant tongue could make of both names nothing longer or more explicit than Pip. So, I called myself Pip, and came to be called Pip."

His name is Philip Pirrip. Brilliant. And the book gets even better. Taken in as a baby by his bullying termagant of a sister and her gentle husband Joe Gargery, he expects a quiet life of contented apprenticeship to Joe. But tiny Pip discovers - and aids - an escaped convict (Abel Magwitch, who totally looks like Robert De Niro in my head) on the marshes one night, and soon after is sent to assist crooked old hag Miss Havisham in Satis House, a temple to time stopped and hearts broken. Ensnared in Havisham's web is beautiful young Estella, crafted into a weapon by the old lady's bitterness, and practising her charms on poor Pip. Nice.

Before I had read this book, I somehow assumed that Dickens wrote fairytales, albeit dark and workhouse-y ones. But the final chapters of this book so delighted me, with their dark looseness and ambiguous resolutions, that I was quite smitten by the whole thing.

Conclusions as a traveller:

England seems pretty grubby. To show your closeness to your host, bring cheese when coming to visit.

So, now I need your help. Please send in any suggestions for the next leg of my journey - following the rules, there's still a fairly hefty range of options left open to me. And whichever kind reader I deem to have helped me get the greatest number of literary passport stamps will receive a beautiful - and I mean beautiful - bundle of Penguin books.

Happy new year,

Sam the Copywriter

*Bar Lolita, obviously.

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VanderMeer's 60-in-60: balm for an unhappy world

The Consolation of Philosophy, written by the sixth-century Roman politician Boethius while he awaited execution for treason, was the subject of Melvyn Bragg's In Our Time on New Year's Day. Suggesting that this book is better than any self-help manual you're likely to find cluttering up your local bookstore at this time of year, this Radio 4 programme drew a line from Plato and Aristotle via Boethius to Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and, finally, Camus in an attempt to show how a rational, philosophical approach to the pain of existence could be at the least consoling and at best exhilarating.

This immediately brought to mind Jeff VanderMeer, who has been immersing himself in some of the great philosophical works of all time, served up in bite-sized chunks in Penguin's three Great Ideas series. He has set himself the task of reading and writing about one book each day for sixty days. He has just finished the first series and has taken a short three-day break to re-charge his intellectual batteries before embarking on phase two. Some might say that far from finding consolation in reading these works back to back, Jeff is actually creating for himself a world of pain, if not a world at the very least riddled with doubt and confusion. But that is to underestimate Jeff: a writer exhilarated by good writing.

Regardless of Jeff's state of mind, his readers, judging by their comments, have found this endeavour both entertaining and instructive (though Jeff, borrowing from Schopenhauer, has taken to calling these same readers his 'fellow sufferers'). The process itself is simple: Jeff posts every day about the book he read the night before, quoting a striking line, providing a brief summary, posing a question for his blog readers, and providing a long commentary on his experience of reading it.

And it is intriguing to see not only how these thinkers and philosophers speak to Jeff but also to each other through this experiment. Jeff has said that he often recognises the ghosts of ancestral writers in the words of those who came after them. While sometimes he wonders how different certain tracts might have been had others, yet to be written, come before. Would the Communist Manifesto, for example, have been any different, had Darwin's On the Origin of Species, which unreservedly placed humankind in the red-in-tooth-and-claw jungle of the animal kingdom, been published first?

His comparisons are also fascinating. I'd never have expected to see Swift and Ruskin directly compared to one another, but Jeff's delight in their use and mastery of the extended metaphor shows the keen eye of a fantasy writer at work. I also enjoyed this playful description of Orwell's writing: 'good prose is a window pane, but sometimes the pane is dirty or cracked, and sometimes it has the reflective qualities of a mirror, or even a hint of soft green fungus growing in the gutter between glass and wood.'

Perhaps most interesting of all is that Jeff finds many of the texts not only highly relevant today but also he suggests that often we have failed to heed the ideas or lessons contained within them. Anyone dispirited by the misadventures of the American government of George W Bush over the last eight years will find that Rousseau's The Social Contract still has a lot to teach, he tells us. While his assessment of Paine's Common Sense ends with this question: Has the United States “in the flesh” lived up to Paine’s faith in it as an idea?

This is the history of thought as dialogue, which underlines the title of this series of books and provides proof, if any were still required, that what Jeff is doing here is far from frivolous.

Here are links to the first series of Great Ideas as read by Jeff:

#1 - Seneca’s On the Shortness of Life
#2 - Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations
#3 - St Augustine’s Confessions of a Sinner
#4 - Thomas à Kempis’ The Inner Life
#5 - Machiavelli’s The Prince
#6 - Montaigne’s On Friendship
#7 - Swift’s A Tale of a Tub
#8 - Rousseau’s The Social Contract
#9 - Edward Gibbon’s The Christians and the Fall of Rome
#10 - Thomas Paine’s Common Sense
#11 - Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Women
#12 - William Hazlitt’s On the Pleasure of Hating
#13 - Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels’ The Communist Manifesto
#14 - Arthur Schopenhauer’s On the Suffering of the World
#15 - John Ruskin’s On Art and Life
#16 - Charles Darwin’s On Natural Selection
#17 - Friedrich Nietzsche’s Why I am So Wise
#18 - Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own
#19 - Sigmund Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents
#20 - George Orwell’s Why I Write

It's balm for an unhappy world.

Colin Brush
Senior Copywriter

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International Book Cover Design

Happy New Year.

I would like to recommend a beautiful book on my favourite subject, cover design.

Earlier this year designer Andrew Howard put together an exhibition of International book cover design in Portugal. Andrew kindly invited me to take part, along with some of the leading lights in the field including Jon Gray, Jamie Keenan and my former Penguin colleague David Pearson.

The catalogue of the exhibition is a great overview of book cover design from around the world, and a lovely object in its own right. Featuring full colour reproductions of over 400 cover designs by 53 designers from 14 countries, the book is now available to buy from this website.

Coralie Bickford-Smith
Senior Designer

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