The Penguin Blog

Scott Free

Penguin recently published a new set of F. Scott Fitzgeralds – beautiful, Art Deco-inspired, foil-decorated hardbacks, designed by Coralie Bickford-Smith. And as it's turned into something of a tradition that when Coralie designs a new set of books we make a blog post about them, we made this video. Really attentive viewers might even spot a chance to win a set of the books...

Great F. Scott from Penguin Books on Vimeo.

I hope you like it, as it was quite traumatic to film.

Here are the books:

And to see the full list, find out more about the books, and buy them all (and why wouldn't you?) just go here.

I think we all realize that it's meaningless to wish good luck to an entire group of people who are in direct competition with each other for a strictly finite reward, and I can only hope that realization doesn't make this sound any less sincere. Good luck to each and every last one of you!

Alan Trotter
Penguin Press Marketing

[UPDATE: The competition's now over, but thank you very much to everyone who entered! The winner has been notified (I'm sure they'll take good care of the books).]

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Prize Draw Terms and Conditions:
1. No purchase necessary to enter the prize draw.
2. This prize draw is open to UK residents aged 14 years or over, with the exception of employees of the Promoter, their families, agents and anyone else connected with this promotion.
3. Entries must be received by 11.59pm GMT on 26 November 2010. The Promoter accepts no responsibility for any entries that are incomplete, illegible, corrupted or fail to reach the Promoter by the relevant closing date for any reason. Entries via agents or third parties are invalid.
4. Only one entry per person. No entrant may win more than one prize.
5. To enter, either post your answer on Twitter, together with the URL http://j.mp/GreatFScott and the hashtag #GreatFScott, or leave a comment with your answer at The Penguin Blog, http://thepenguinblog.typepad.com.
6. All correctly completed entries will be entered into a prize draw which will take place on 29 November 2010. The first entry drawn at random will be the winner.
7. The prize for the winner is a set of six F. Scott Fitzgerald titles: The Great Gatsby, Tender is the Night, This Side of Paradise, The Last Tycoon, The Beautiful and Damned and Flappers and Philosophers.
8. Prizes are subject to availability. In the event of unforeseen circumstances, the Promoter reserves the right (a) to substitute alternative prizes of equivalent or greater value and (b) in exceptional circumstances to amend or foreclose the promotion without notice. No correspondence will be entered into.
9. The winner will be notified via email or post by 3 December 2010. The winner must claim their prize within 14 working days of the Promoter sending notification. If the prize is unclaimed after this time, it will lapse and the Promoter reserves the right to offer the unclaimed prize to a substitute winner selected in accordance with these rules.
10. To obtain details of the winner please email penguinclassics@penguin.co.uk stating the name of the prize draw in the subject heading 4 weeks after the closing date.
11. The Promoter will use any data submitted by entrants only for the purposes of running the prize draw, unless otherwise stated in the entry details. By entering this prize draw, all entrants consent to the use of their personal data by the Promoter for the purposes of the administration of this prize draw and any other purposes to which the entrant has consented.
12. The winners agree to take part in reasonable post event publicity and to the use of their names and photographs in such publicity.
13. By entering the prize draw each entrant agrees to be bound by these terms and conditions.
14. The Promoter is Penguin Books Limited, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL.
15. These terms and conditions are governed in accordance with the laws of England and Wales.

Picture books for the digital generation

Today is an incredibly exciting day. Today is the launch of the Puffin Digital Prize and a brave new world for Puffin picture books. I'm so excited I can hardly breathe. But, I'm getting ahead of myself. Let me take a deep breath and I’ll explain things properly. I'll start at the very beginning . . .

As the Editorial Director of Puffin Picture Books, I am the lucky girl who has the privilege of working on beautifully illustrated, full colour books for young readers. Think Raymond Briggs and The Snowman, add Helen Oxenbury and Julia Donaldson and you get the picture. As I said, I am VERY lucky. But I wasn't feeling quite so lucky a little while ago, when the word digital was a real thorn in my side. How did picture  books fit into this amazing digital world everyone was talking about? Well, quite simply, they didn't. Being full colour with integrated text, the technology simply didn't exist to bring them to life on a digital device. I would enviously look at my fiction colleagues with their e-readers where a whole world of stories lived and breathed in one nifty little machine. Sigh. All I could do was be patient. One day, I said to my beautiful, fully illustrated books, one day, your time will come.

And come it did with a bang - the iPad. Woo-hoo! Like every other person at Penguin, I used all sorts of ruses, good and bad, to get my hands on one. And when I did it felt like Christmas. I've always been a 
book-sniffer (I use that term affectionately, someone who loves a book for being a book as well as a fabulous story) but my conversion was complete in that one moment. Just look at what this thing can do! We have glorious technicolour in fantastic resolution but that's just the beginning. There are interactive games, enhancements, zoom in/zoom out functions, not to mention the wonderful apps where information architects build amazing book experiences at the touch of a screen. (Yes, I know - information architects? I don't know what they do either, it's very technical apparently, but boy am I glad that they are part of my world now!) Now we can read a picture book by flipping through the pages with a swipe or a tap. Talk about a head spin.

There's no doubting that these new platforms will spell out a new world for picture books. They will no longer be bound by the contstraint of 32 pages, it can be what you like. The sky is the limit. But not everything has changed, we are still here to serve our audience of three to six year olds who still love a ripping good yarn, whatever the format.

So, if you think you might be the Eric Carle or Quentin Blake of the digital generation, then we would love to hear from you. The Puffin Digital Prize is open to every writer, illustrator, designer and digital creative, and we’re asking you to create a digital story and win the opportunity to see your book published. We know how much talent is out there and this is your opportunity to showcase it. Find out more at www.puffindigitalprize.co.uk. Good luck!

Louise Bolongaro
Editorial Director, Puffin Picture Books

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Puffin by Design - 70 Years of Imagination (1940 - 2010)

‘Never judge a book by its cover.’ So they say. But whoever they are, I think they are wrong! All books should, and are in the first instance anyway, always be judged by their covers.

For seventy years now, lots of great designers have been creating covers for Puffin. In those seventy years there have been some amazing covers and, I’m afraid to say, some not so . . .

Puffin by Design, which publishes today, is full of hundreds of the amazing covers that have been designed over the years. Everyone will have their favourites. Here are some of mine:

      

We all remember the cover that was on a book when we read it, and seeing it again brings back memories. At the beginning of researching Puffin by Design we spent time in Puffin’s archive library, which lives in a huge warehouse in Rugby. We poured over the rows and rows of bookshelves and were constantly shouting out, ‘I remember that one!’, ‘Oh, I LOVED that book!’, and also, ‘OMG, what were they thinking?!’

Puffin by Design’s cover was created using about 1,000 books taken from the archive. After carefully laying them out on our canteen floor, leaving spaces to spell out the title, we leaned over the balcony above to take the photo. I hope you agree it looks stunning and you can spend ages spotting your favourite covers.

You can see the whole day in five minutes in this fabulous little film.

For me, the cover is the door to the book, and to the world inside. I am very lucky that creating covers is my job. It is a challenge and an honour. I love it.

Anna Billson
Art Director, Puffin

Seeing (RED)

Yesterday Penguin published the first set of our (Penguin Classics)RED – beautiful books that help raise money for a very good cause. And to celebrate we spoke to some of the designers about their work.

Each of the eight books had a different designer, but we could only speak to three. At least, we could only speak to three without travelling more than a few desks away. Our charitableness does have some limits.

Luckily though, the three designers within spitting distance are three of the most delightful designers you could ever hope to meet, and I'd personally like to apologise for spitting towards them to check the validity of that metaphor. I'm sorry, Jim Stoddart, Coralie Bickford-Smith and Stefanie Posavec.

And Marketing Manager Natalie Ramm was also on hand to explain why the books are a very good thing, and not just aesthetically.

Footnotes

The four videos on Vimeo: Natalie, Jim, Coralie, Stefanie.

Natalie's favourite is The House of Mirth by Edith Warton.

Jim designed Thérèse Raquin by Émile Zola.

Coralie designed The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad and was inspired by Tom Phillips's The Humument.

Stefanie designed Great Expectations by Charles Dickens.

You can find out more about all eight titles at http://penguin.co.uk/RED and see all the covers at Flickr.

And thank you to pidgin for the music – 'Tamzin and Me'.

Alan
Copywriter

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Central European Classics

Editor Simon Winder, the man behind such great ideas as the Great Ideas, explains the inspiration for our new series of Central European Classics, which are published today.

This series originates in a visit I made to Krakow last summer where I was talking to a Polish publisher who had known Czesław Miłosz and who berated me for the useless way in which Miłosz was published in English – it was his essays which were so valued and admired in Poland and yet these were virtually unknown in Britain. Suitably shamed I read lots of the essays and, indeed, they were amazing. So then the challenge became, how could a suitable frame be created for republishing them? I have always been obsessed with Central Europe so it didn't take a huge leap of imagination to see that it might be possible to create a series which would allow readers to come to a range of great writers - the series could tell a story (from before the First World War to the last years of the Cold War), it could usefully highlight the switch from Soviet 'Eastern Europe' to modern 'Central Europe', and it could be made out of all kinds of writing - essays, novels, memoirs, philosophy, short stories.

Colleagues at Penguin contributed important elements, not least the amazing little book How I Came to Know Fish by Ota Pavel, a rhapsodic but also deeply painful account of learning as a child to fish in Bohemia before the Second World War and then having to use that skill to survive the Nazi occupation. I used the opportunity of the series to throw together some of my favourite books: Gregor von Rezzori's The Snows of Yesteryear, Thomas Bernhard's Old Masters and Karel Čapek's War with the Newts - books which in different ways repay endless rereading. Josef Škvorecký's Czech novel The Cowards had been for many years in Penguin Modern Classics and had gone out of print, so this seemed the perfect chance to revive it. György Faludy's great (and very funny) memoir My Happy Days in Hell turned out to be available - as did Sławomir Mrożek's little book of surreal stories The Elephant. We had received a proposal for a new translation of Gyula Krúdy's beautiful short stories about Habsburg Budapest, so that was a fun piece of luck. The series was finished up by a conversation with John Gray about Emil Cioran's searing collection of aphorisms A Short History of Decay - and suddenly we had ten absolutely fascinating and brilliant books.

Central European Classics does not pretend to be definitive or even particularly coherent - there are many other candidates who could not be included because of lack of space or copyright problems (I was personally particularly sad not to include Hrabal's Too Loud a Solitude, Handke's Repetition and Kis's The Encyclopedia of the Dead), but the ten books do give a sense of the atmosphere of a vast band of cultures across the 20th century - from the delights of Budapest in its pre-1914 heyday (Life is a Dream) to the acrid cynicism of neutral Vienna in the 1980s (Old Masters), and lying at its heart the terrible experience of the 1940s.

We decided to use very bright colours for the jackets as it had become a Cold War tradition to design jackets for so much writing from this zone of Europe in greys and blacks. Many of these books had been deeply tangled in arguments about the nature of the Iron Curtain and had fallen out of circulation when the USSR finally collapsed. By reimagining the books' appearance the hope is that people will look at them with fresh eyes and see them not as ideological documents, but as great and enduring works of art - sometimes grim, but often extremely funny and constantly surprising.

Simon Winder
Publishing Director, Penguin Press

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Classic blog post

Put your hands up if you remember Alan the Copywriter, one time inhabitant of these shores.

I thought so.

Well, it turns out that he also remembers you. Yes, that includes you slouching at the back. Pay attention there.

Anyway, Alan did not a few posts on this here blog about some of the rather cool designs coming out of Penguin Press last year. One of the highlights was an innovative interview he did with designer and damn good egg Coralie Bickford-Smith. This made a lot of people very envious. Of Coralie; of Alan; of smart and sexy people having smart and sexy fun.

What do you mean: don't remember, sir? Got eyes, haven't you? Then why don't you refresh your memory by taking a good look at this. 

 

Where was I?

Oh yes. Alan. He's not been quiet in his absence. He has his own blog now - smartysexypants that he is, he appears to have set it up all by himself. It's very cool and called Greater Than Or Equal To. And to prove that he still has his fingers on the publishing pulse he's just done a new interview with Coralie about her wonderful new designs for some new Penguin hardback classics.

New, you hear. It's all brand, spanking new.

So why not get over there and see what Alan and Coralie have got to say to each other. Poke around. Go through Alan's drawers. Criticise his choice of wallpaper. Get the keys to his liquor cabinet and go get good and drunk.

Smart and sexy don't even begin to describe the fun you'll have.

Colin Brush
Senior Copywriter

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Penguin Press Design July '09*

It's been mentioned once or twice that there should be more about book covers on this blog and so this is the first in an attempt to bring monthly highlights of new cover designs from the Penguin Press part of Penguin.

But this will be a bit of a bloated blog entry because before we get onto July's choice of brand new covers this would be a great opportunity to answer another frequently asked question: ‘how does it all happen then, covers and that?’

Well, in the Penguin Press Art Dpt we have 5 in-house designers (including myself) and 2 people working on sourcing images, but we also tap into a huge range of freelance creatives too. This is in order to tackle between 30-50 new covers per month.

The birth of a book cover starts a cosily maternal nine months before publication. Every book we publish is championed by a Commissioning Editor or Publisher. At the very beginning of the process that editor will raise the new title at a weekly cover meeting where the design brief for the cover will be discussed. We thrash out the what is exciting about the book, significant thrusts, the author's previous, the potential readership and any unique aspects. It works best when there is a lot of free-association as well as factual details. As Art Director I scribble down as many key points as seem to offer inspiration. Then we take the brief and gestate. Figuring out a course of action is not always straight forward, but reading what is available (finished chapters, intruductions) helps incredibly.

Our Picture Editor, Samantha Johnson, also attends the initial cover brieing meeting and she and I discuss the potential direction of each cover and whether we need some picture research or specific image commissioning to be done.

Then I'll figure out a suitable designer to work on each book. We'll also have a departmental run through of the cover briefs and often one of the designers will particularly want to work on a specific book or throw in an idea or two. Designers tend to be very creative with solutions, and they'll pitch visuals using both recommended images and images they've sourced or created themslves. But I will always be trying to get them to convey the 'spark' of the book that was so thoroughly established in the original brief.

Ideally, and with all things in place, we could have up to 3 months to work up a cover. But in reality this is unlikely.  We're often extremely busy with existing projects from previous months, and in-house designers will juggle half a dozen covers at a time.

Each cover may face a wide range of hurdles and conflicting opinions, his is the very nature of book covers. Good designers tend to be very focussed and resiliant, and the value of a good sense of humour cannot be underestimated. As with most design jobs there is a balance of concept, craftsmanship and time dexterity required. Any number of changes to the brief may occur even once the design is finished. But in Penfuin Press it is widely appreciated that the more a cover is 'tweaked' by a committee the less chance there is of retaining that original spark that we all know helps a book stand out in a world where thousands of books are vying for attention.

When a number of honed front cover visuals are ready I wiil take them back to the cover meeting and recommend one for approval. If others in the meeting concur, the designer will finish off any details or amends and prepare the back cover and spine artwork. We'll then circulate the artwork for sign-off from everyone involved.

At this point we've got to six months before publication and we have an important deadline to send that particular month's cover artwork to the printers for wet-proofing. The proofs are used by Penguin's sales teams to help win orders for each book from shops and outlets. We'll also re-circulate the proofs to key people at Penguin forchecking and signing off one more time. In the Art Dpt we also check proofs for colour, legibility, typos and ensure all picture rights are cleared.

Then at around 3 months before publication there is another big deadline where we send the final cross-checked signed-off cover to the printers to become a book.

And that's that. Easy as ABC.

I can go through a couple of our July publications to help illustrate it all.

Why Is Q Always Followed By U is one of the first books to be published on our new Particular Books imprint. It's a book about language quirks by linguistic expert Michael Quinion and the cover design process was about as straight forward as it gets.

I think I made this sketch soon after the cover briefing meeting:

Presented this concept at a cover meeting soon after for general concept before commissioning:

Commissioned illustrator Kate Forrester who did this lively interpretation:

This is the jacket we proofed:

And this is the final jacket we printed, with amended subtitle and added quotes:

If only they were all as simple as that.

Another July example is the jacket for The Junior Officers' Reading Club. This is a unique book written by Patrick Hennessey, an active soldier on duty with his regiment in Iraq and Afghanistan. Hennessey describes life in a modern army and our early discussions about the cover worked around the idea of showing the solace and escapism (or lack of) a book brings in tense surroundings. Hennessey even had a great range of photos he had taken himself and one particular shot of him at rest with some of his squadron seemed to sum up much of the book quite concisely. Hennessey is pictured reading while his colleagues sleep, weapons piled up around them:

 

This is the initial range of in-house visuals working with this photo. Here the designer tries a few different approaches, some too booky, and some possibly better for a paperback rather than a hardback:

This was the the front cover of the jacket we proofed:

But having lived with this cover for a couple of months there was a general feeling emerging at Penguin that this cover was possibly to journalistic and didn't convey some of the more literary qualities of the book. So I asked freelance desiger David Wardle to come up with some new ideas, and this one leapt out as a great front cover, and this is now the final jacket, printed and in the shops just a few weeks later. The book is selling very well:

Now let's have a look at some of the new Penguin Press book covers born July 2009.

Firstly, on the Allen Lane hardback non-fiction imprint:

In Search of Civilization (design in-house by Stafanie Posavec)

Good Value (design Jamie Keenan)

Also on our Particular Books imprint:

The Country Alphabet (cover illustration by Mark Thomas)

Onto the pick of this month's Penguin Press Paperbacks:

Outliers (design in-house by Stefanie Posavec)

Lewis Carroll in Numberland (design David Mann, who was in-house when this was put together)

Traffic (design in-house by Richard Green)

What Next? (photography by Suki Dhanda)

The Secret Life of Birds (Illustration by Delphine Lebourgois)

The Money Machine (design by YES)

And the pick of new/refreshed Penguin Classics are here too:

The Prince (design in-house by Coralie Bickford-Smith)

The latest in our refreshed Orwell fiction Modern Classics (some already out), with illustrations by Marion Deuchars:

And the latest Susan Sontag Modern Classics (reportage for her non-fiction, paintings for her fiction):

And lastly for this month. A new cover for Verne’s Journey to the Centre of the Earth, with new illustration by Stephen Rothwell:

And that rounds up July’s pick of the month. Next month we can bring you images of the iminent publication of the next Great Ideas series.

Jim Stoddart
Art Director, Penguin Press

* Yes, I know it is late August. We're sorry.

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The science (fiction) of cover art

So thanks to Boing! Boing! for pointing out The Art of Penguin Science Fiction.

I was at the Arthur C Clarke Awards on Wednesday night with a friend of mine from publishing who doesn't normally read much science fiction. She looked at the covers of the six shortlisted books on display up on the cinema screen, and said words to the effect of: 'Why has only one of them got a decent jacket?' The decent jacket she was referring to was Martin Martin's On the Other Side by Mark Wernham, published as a mainstream novel by Jonathan Cape.

I looked at the six books and realised that while I didn't agree that the covers were all bad (they're certainly not), I accepted that they were unlikely to appeal to anyone outside a genre audience. This is not necessarily a bad thing. These books feature robots, spaceships, multiple clones, parallel universes, and enough future speculation to cause your average geek to burst a diode but also cause your average English literature graduate schooled in twentieth-century naturalism to weep into their kitchen sink. (My advice to the kitchen sinkers: get out more, or at least check out the horrors lurking in the cellar or the angels living it up in the attic.)

However, these covers ARE a problem if you want to tempt readers from outside the genre.

Which is why I got quite excited by these old Penguin SF covers. Because they rarely employ what have become your standard science fiction tropes. They may be loud or garish or freaky but there's a hell of a lot more wit and coolness and originality about them than a picture of a rocket ship hanging in space.

Over the last few years Victor Gollancz has pushed the envelope further by producing some wonderful, award-winning backlist SF editions (here are the latest set).

Congratulations to Ian R MacLeod and PS Publishing for winning 2009's Clarke with literary science fiction novel Song of Time. This limited edition £20 hardback from a small press publisher featuring a specially commissioned painting by fan-favourite Edward Miller was never going to be bought by anyone other than the faithful.

But perhaps the Award will bring a new mass market edition with a more allusive cover to draw in those, like my friend, who think science fiction is still in desperate need of a makeover.

Colin Brush
Senior Creative Copywriter

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The Colophon

Lovers of colophonic artistry should immediately check out this great collection of vintage colophons - A-G here and h-z here. My personal favourite is this one for Phantom Books - what's yours?

Jeremy Ettinghausen, Digital Publisher

(vintage colophons via Nevver and Draplin.com)

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Cutting and Pasting

It's throwdown time. Cut&Paste are bringing their Digital Design Tournament - a kind of design face off, MC style - to London next month. Brave designers, illustrators and animators will take the stage and do battle, against each other and against the clock. No, I shall not be competing but I do get to be one of the judges for the 2D category. 

Have look at the website for more information about the event and see videos of recent contests from all over the world.

It's an interesting concept and I can't wait to see how it works on the night. I must confess I'm a little nervous about being a judge - what if I discover a Simon Cowell side to my personality (the horror, the horror ...)?

Props to the contestants then, for getting up there doing their thing in front of a large crowd, which I imagine is even more nerve-wracking than having work on the table at a Penguin cover meeting.

Those about to draw, I salute you.

Coralie Bickford-Smith, Senior cover designer

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