2025 is the ninetieth anniversary of the launch of Penguin Books one of the UK’s most enduring and successful publishers. From the outset Penguin was synonymous with its branding with their considered logos, fonts and most vividly their colour coded series – orange for fiction, green for crime fiction, dark blue for biography and so on.[1] Sought after as much for the look as the content, books published by Penguin from the mid 1930s until the early 1970s are icons of British book design.
What was to become one of the publishers’ key series was launched in light blue in May 1937 with the appearance of The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism, Capitalism, Sovietism and Fascism by no less than George Bernard Shaw. This was Penguin’s non-fiction imprint Pelican Books.
The Penguin ethos from the outset was to produce reprints of edifying work. This was the initial intention when Shaw’s The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism and Capitalism, originally published in 1928, was chosen to be the first Pelican title. However, the managing director of Bodley Head and founder of Penguin Books, Allen Lane persuaded the eminent critic, wit and playwright to add new chapters explaining the then rising political forces of fascism and Soviet Bolshevism. Shaw’s new chapters became the first original writing produced for the house of Penguin.[2]
Writing in 1956 the Penguin editor in chief Sir William Emrys Williams claimed that the Pelican name was adopted because many early correspondents with the firm absent mindedly addressed their letters to ‘Pelican Books’ clearly recognising that a seabird starting with the letter ‘p’ was involved just not necessarily the right one. With ever an eye on a commercial opportunity and, according to Williams, to head off competitors that might exploit the ‘Pelican’ in attempted piracy of the Penguin brand the Pelican name was duly adopted.[3]
Although Baines suggests that ‘there was no rigorous dividing line between Pelican and Penguin subject areas’[4], Williams argues humorously in terms of 1950s BBC radio that Pelican was the ‘Third Programme equivalent of the Home Service Penguin’[5] – intellectual and serious Pelicans, Penguins, not so much – although definitely not the Light Programme. Quality pocket sized books at affordable prices, the non-fiction remit took Pelican into the diverse realms of art, history, literary criticism, astronomy, philosophy, architecture, music, and science.
Most of the early Pelicans maintained the look of the Penguin main series designed by Edward Young – three broad blocks, with Gill Sans font – the lead colour being light blue. The other difference was the flapping Pelican logo also created by Young[6] (see Fig. 1)
Then, in 1949, under the influence of the esteemed German typographer Jan Tschichold who worked at Penguin between 1947 and 1949 the format diverged from the main series. The colour scheme was maintained but used to frame a white central panel containing author, title and some explanatory text for the prospective buyer[7], presumably so they didn’t need to pick the book up to find out what it was all about (see Fig. 2).
Williams lauded the simplicity demonstrated in Pelicans by the non-pictorial cover on paperback books, essentially denouncing American publishers’ insistence on gaudy pictures as vulgar.[8] However, the pictorial cover was steadily creeping in to the Penguin stable even as Williams was writing in 1956. Nevertheless it was not until the arrival of the new Italian Cover Art Director Germano Facetti in early 1961 that a policy of creating a design for each title was adopted, all of which required an array of artists, designers and even cartoonists.
From the examples in Figs. 3-7 Erwin Fabian and Kiky Vices Vinci were artists, variously involved with jewellery design, sculpture and graphic design; Alan Aldridge was a graphic designer employed at Penguin; Mel Calman was a cartoonist, a regular in the broadsheets. Even this small sample shows the ambition of the imprint in terms of the rich variety of subjects tackled and artistic representations of the works in their covers.
At the National Library of Scotland thanks to our legal deposit privilege there is an almost complete run of Pelican Books published from 1937 until the early 1970s (and beyond). There are also numerous books about the publisher its output and the art their designers created, a selection of which is given below.
[1] Wood, p.8.
[2] Baines, p.12.
[3] Williams, p.12.
[4] Baines, pp.14-15 – the notable non-fiction titles in the main series are ‘World Affairs’.
[5] Williams, p.12.
[6] Baines, p.15.
[7] Baines. pp. 50-51 and 62-63.
[8] Williams, p.26.
References, with National Library of Scotland in square brackets
Baines, Phil. Penguin by design. London : Allen Lane, 2005 [shelfmark PB3.209.27/4]
Green, Evelyn. The pictorial cover. Manchester : Manchester Polytechnic Library, 1981 [shelfmark HP1.81.4351]
Hare, Steve. Penguin portrait. London : Penguin, 1995 [shelfmark HP2.95.7802]
Hare, Steve. Penguin by illustrators. [London] : Penguin Collectors Society, 2009 [shelfmark PB6.212.302/1]
penguinfirsteditions.com, 2019. Penguin First Editions [online]. Available from https://www.penguinfirsteditions.com/. [Accessed 9 April 2025]
Penguins progress 1935-1960. Harmondsworth : Penguin, 1960 [shelfmark 5.2411]
Williams, Sir William Emrys. The Penguin story. Harmondsworth : Penguin, 1956 [shelfmark H1.94.186]
Wood, Sally. ‘A sort of dignified flippancy’. Edinburgh : Edinburgh University Library, 1985 [shelfmark HP1.86.1422]
Figures
Fig. 1 – Genetics by H. Kalmus in collaboration with Lettice M. Crump. 1948, Pelican series no. A179 [NLS shelfmark P.med.1701[A179]].
Fig. 2 – The Scots by Moray McLaren. 1951, Pelican series no. A256 [NLS shelfmark P.med.1701[A256]].
Fig. 3 – The business of management by Roger Falk. 1961, Pelican series no. A528. Cover designed by Erwin Fabian [NLS shelfmark P.med.1701[A528]].
Fig 4 – A history of Scotland by J.D.Mackie. 1964, Pelican series no. A671. Cover designed by Alan Aldridge [NLS shelfmark P.med.1701[A671]].
Fig 5. – Score : the strategy of taking tests by Darrell Huff. 1966, Pelican series no. A689. Cover designed by Mel Calman [NLS shelfmark P.med.1701[A689]].
Fig 6. – Invitation to sociology : a humanistic perspective by Peter L. Berger. 1966, Pelican series no. A841. Cover uses “Research for a Modifiable Structure” by Kiky Vices Vinci [NLS shelfmark P.med.1701[A7841]].
Fig. 7 – The new poetic : Yeats to Eliot by C.K.Stead. 1967, Pelican series no. A902. Cover designed by Germano Facetti [NLS shelfmark P.med.1701[902]].