Seven Hundred Penguins (Art & Design) [Paperback]

Penguin (Author)

Book Description

Series: Art & Design | Publication Date: January 2009

A collection of Penguin covers from Britain and around the world, "Seven Hundred Penguins" is a celebration of jackets that remain visually distinctive and addictive to us today, from the beautiful to the garish, design classics to design oddities. A full-colour, sensuous delight, with one jacket on every page, the featured jackets represent the personal favourites of Penguin staff from offices all over the world, and run from Penguin's birth in 1935 to the end of the twentieth century.Throughout there are jackets that bring back a flood of memories of the first time a book was read; there is beautiful typography from Jan Tschicold; arresting illustrations; visual witticisms from Derek Birdsall; countless mutations of the much-loved Penguin grid. There are also, with no formula at all, jackets that just make sense. Featuring old favourites and plenty of surprises, "700 Penguins" is a unique and inspiring collection of the most impactful and well-loved Penguin covers of the twentieth century.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Penguin Press was formed in 1935 by Sir Allen Lane, then-editorial director of The Bodley Head. It was the first company to bring good-quality, contemporary literature to readers at an affordable price. In 1946, it launched the Penguin Classics series, itself now a classic. Penguin publishes books under a variety of imprints including Puffin, DK, Hamish Hamilton, Viking, Rough Guides and Ladybird. Now more than seventy years old, Penguin is the home of reading.

Product Details

• Paperback: 720 pages
• Publisher: Penguin Books (January 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0141031883
• ISBN-13: 978-0141031880
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.7 x 2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,857,688 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars This bird doesn't fly, March 31, 2008

By 

Robin Benson - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Seven Hundred Penguins (Art & Design) (Paperback)

If you have the previous excellent cover book: Penguin by Design: A Cover Story 1935-2005, you might wonder if a book of seven hundred covers is really needed. From my point of view probably not mainly because the editorial idea for this thick chunky book is rather badly thought out.

The seven hundred (reduced to ninety percent of their original size)
are presented one to a page at random with only twelve pre-1950. I would have thought that an historical sequence would have been more interesting and then possibly breaking that down to fiction or non-fiction. Obviously fiction covers allow for much more visual creativity and to see how graphic styles have changed over the years would be interesting.

Another annoyance I found was that none of the covers have captions on the same page. It really is a nonsense to have to keep turning to the fourteen pages at the back of the book just to find who the artist or photographer was or the date of publication. Incidentally the index is not very readable being set in fairly small serif type without the use of bold for the page number.

I was surprised that so many of the covers show signs of wear or fading. Maybe copies were just taken from the archive shelves and just photocopied, it certainly looks that way. Maybe a drop shadow on two sides would have helped.

Penguin Books are rightly famous for taking trouble over the whole package: the choice of authors, subjects, design of text pages and covers but I thought Seven Hundred Penguins suggests a rather slapdash quickie title that doesn't deliver. It could have looked so good!

***FOR AN INSIDE LOOK click 'customer images' under the cover.