The Penguin Blog

TODAY: Inside Penguin – meet the designers on 6th October

UPDATE:

The designers – Coralie Bickford-Smith, Katy Finch, Richard Green, Benjamin Hughes, Lee Motley and Matthew Young – will be here TODAY between 1 and 2pm to answer your questions about what they do at Penguin: the second in a series of live Q&As to give you a behind-the-scenes look at how publishing really works. We’ll be responding to the questions you’ve already asked, and answering any new questions you have in the comments section, so get posting below.

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Penguin are setting up a series of live webchats with people working in different roles around the company, to give you an inside glimpse at how the publishing industry works and what we all do. Our last Q&A session with Penguin’s copywriters generated a lot of discussion, so we’re running another webchat next week on Thursday 6th October. This time you can meet the cover designers – the people with one of the most enviable but pressurised jobs in publishing.

Want to know how a Penguin cover gets designed, where designers get their inspiration from, what makes a good jacket, or anything else? They will be here on the Penguin Blog to reveal the secrets of their trade on Thursday 6th October between 1 and 2pm.

Our online panel, in alphabetical order, will be:

Coralie Bickford-Smith – a Senior Designer for the Penguin Press division, where she has created several series designs. She graduated from Reading University after studying Typography and Graphic Communication and has worked in-house at Penguin Books since 2002.

Katy Finch - Puffin Fiction Design Manager, designing covers and insides for a variety of titles including Roald Dahl backlist, children's classics and Young Adult titles. She has worked at Penguin for 6 years, and graduated from Glasgow School of Art in 1999.

Richard Green - a Senior Designer for Penguin Press, working mainly on non-fiction titles. He has been designing covers for over 10 years.

Benjamin Hughes – Senior Designer, Media and Entertainment, Penguin Children's. Ben has worked at Penguin for 4 years, designing book covers, insides and new formats for a range of brands including Doctor Who, TopGear and the Harry Potter film franchise.

Lee Motley – a Deputy Art Director who works on a variety of books across Penguin’s General and Michael Joseph divisions, focusing largely on commercial women’s fiction titles.

Matthew Young – a Junior Cover Designer in Penguin Press, who graduated from uni last summer and started his job here in February. To date he has designed 16 book covers, mostly for non-fiction titles.

Get thinking about what you’d like to ask them, and feel free to start posting your questions now in the comments section below, so they’ll have plenty to get to grips with. Come back on Thursday 6th October between 1 and 2pm to see how they reply and to post any more questions you might have.

Louise Willder, Copywriter

Doing Dickens - Part 3

David Copperfield: not just an 80’s magician with a mullet but, as I have now discovered, one of the greatest novels ever created by a human hand. Ever.

Eagle-eyed readers may note that David Copperfield is not Charles Dickens’s third novel. We did things slightly out of order this month in our Dickens readathon due to circumstances beyond our control (and too boring to go into), but – what a happy accident, because it meant we got to discover the utter wondrousness of this novel.

I am in love with this book. I love its characters – straight-backed, stern Betsy Trotwood, a model for all womankind; charismatic, complicated wrong’un Steerforth; strange, furious Rosa Dartle, whose scar becomes livid as she gets angry; slimy Uriah Heep, whose fingers leave snails’ trails when he reads a book; David’s nurse Peggotty, whose buttons pop from her dress as she hugs him. I love the novel’s richness, the way everything bursts from the page, as if even a book of this size can’t contain Dickens’s inventiveness. Yet it has a brain as well as a heart. The characters change, they contradict themselves, they do incredibly stupid and incredibly heroic things. The dialogue is perfect and the writing is so clever: the interplay between David looking back and David his younger self means you could almost describe him as a bit of an unreliable narrator (indeed, I am sure that, had I ever got round to reading David Copperfield at university rather than watching Cracker, I would have written an essay on this).  

I had already started getting obsessed with Dickens, for example starting to describe everything I saw, read or heard as ‘So Dickensian’ (“look at that chimney sweep! How Dickensian!”). Now I know that Dickens and I are going to be friends for life. We are bezzies. Please, please read it, everybody!

Here’s why the others loved it so much:

‘Since I reached the final (six millionth) page of David Copperfield I've been reading this year's Booker Prize shortlist novels, and I keep thinking: 'Oh, come on!  Be better! Be as good as David Copperfield!' Even allowing for Dickens' habit of moralising about fallen women, this is one of the best and most enjoyable books I've ever read. The humour is sharp and feels completely undated. The major characters, like Mr Micawber, Betsy Trotwood are legendary and have pubs named after them for good reasons. The minor characters are all strong enough to inhabit whole books of their own; I loved the kind hearted funeral director, Mr Omer, who is troubled by the fact that he can never find a non-sinister way to ask after the health of his old or sick neighbours. David C. himself is so hopeless, likeable and convincingly real, that I rooted for him from the first page. I got so emotionally wrapped up in it all that I cried at my desk one lunch time, reading the bit about the death of a lapdog. I'm embarrassed about that in retrospect. A genius book, and a very funny one. No one should let the thickness of the spine deter them from trying it.’  Becky Stocks

‘I absolutely loved David Copperfield from start to finish. David is such a well-rounded, true, sympathetic character, and his whole world is one I was so delighted to visit. Although it's 850 pages in the edition we read, it never felt like a labour to read and was a real page-turner. I laughed and cried at Dora's silliness, Micawber's compulsive letter-writing, the kindness of the whole Peggotty family and the goodness of Doctor Strong and Mr Dick. The crocodile book! The donkeys! Tommy Traddles! Even Uriah Heep (one of the literary world's most dreadful villains) is utterly believable, evincing, if not pity, then certainly an understanding of how he became the man he is. Now I just need to find out Mr Micawber's punch recipe.’  Sam Binnie

Louise Willder, Copywriter

There’s Something About Jane Eyre: One Day in Haworth

As autumn creeps into view and the cold sets in, the only real way to lift one’s spirits is to settle down with a period drama, a behind-the-scenes tour of the Brontë’s home, and a talk on the moors with a Hollywood director. So, naturally I headed up to Haworth in Yorkshire, land of windswept heather and numerous local businesses with the word Brontë in their name, to interview Cary Fukunaga, 34, whose brilliant new adaptation of Jane Eyre is out today.

 

Jane’s tempestuous love affair with the enigmatic Mr Rochester has already spawned eighteen TV and film adaptations, but there really is something special about this one, which follows Cary’s 2009 Sin Nombre – perhaps it’s Mia Wasikowska’s stunning performance as Jane, headstrong and with an effortless Yorkshire lilt (Anne Hathaway, take note), and her chemistry with Michael Fassbender’s deeply sexy Mr Rochester, who Cary sees as a true Byronic hero. Most definitely the perfect cure for seasonal malaise.

As the sun set on the moors in Haworth, I asked Cary how he came to the book and experienced it for the first time. ‘I was first introduced to Jane Eyre as a film, the 1943 version by Bob Stephens.’ He didn’t actually read the novel until two years before making the film, but loved it instantly: ‘I think it was incredible writing. I decided I would underline passages that I liked and I ended up underlining almost the entire book.’ Reading it was a physical experience; ‘Once you manage to master the book you know where things are, what you want, you flick around and find things… my copy is definitely dog-eared now.’ Jane herself was the central attraction: ‘she’s a rare heroine in literature.’

Thumbing through the book so thoroughly enabled Cary to really get to grips with some of its haunting imagery and to draw this out into the film. The idea of Rochester as a lion and Jane as a lamb was important: ‘that was definitely a theme that is a leitmotif in the film. There’s this famous Unicorn tapestry that we changed into a tapestry of a lion eating a lamb that’s in Rochester’s office.’ The book’s overtly religious concerns aren’t something Cary wanted to focus on, though: ‘I didn’t want this to be a film about God – even though it is an important part of what Charlotte wrote. I think there are a lot of other aspects of the story that are strictly ethical and moral and I just didn’t want to stuff it with that.’

During a brilliant ‘behind the scenes’ tour of the Parsonage, the Brontës’ home, we were shown some of Charlotte’s delicately sad paintings and tragic letters. It’s hard not to wonder whether being surrounded by stark moorland and an overflowing graveyard had an impact on her psyche, and the sometimes shockingly dark atmosphere of Jane Eyre. Cary and I discussed the concept of the gothic in the novel, and how this comes through strongly in the film. ‘It’s an early idea of gothic. In the scene with Richard Mason, you have references to religion and to the apostles and to mortality. Gothic to me is always somehow related with death.’  Cary points out that Charlotte was literally surrounded by death her whole life. ‘Charlotte grew up in a cemetery. She understood who she was after that.’

  

What of the novel’s other characters, and the structure they lend to the film? Judi Dench is a cracking Mrs Fairfax, Thornfield’s housekeeper who narrates some of the crucial action, and Jamie Bell gives a fresh take on the austere and often-marginalised St John Rivers. Here his presence is pivotal and frames the entire film, a careful decision on Cary’s part: ‘one of the most important parts of doing it that way was to meet St John Rivers earlier on in the story, because for me an essential part of Jane’s character is her decision between Rivers and Rochester … that choice that she makes in the film defines who she is. By putting her choice at the beginning we could then pepper his story across the film without really slowing its last act. What you really want to find out is if she ends up going back to Rochester or not.’

This probably won’t be the last Jane Eyre, either: ‘For the same reason that Shakespeare’s put on every year. The Classics are re-told because as long as they’re relevant to our experience they will be re-told.’ It is the actual timely moment that the film inhabits that defines it, he says: ‘all of us who came together for that particular moment in time to make this film, their image is forever locked there. Mia will always be 19 years old in this film.’ And there’s something daring about committing that moment to time. ‘You never know where a film’s going to go – that’s the exciting and scary thing about making a film: it ends up being immortal as well as the book.’

 

Rose Goddard
Editorial Co-ordinator, Penguin Classics

 

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