In April 1961 four titles were published by Penguin with a new look and a new name: Penguin Modern Classics.
They were The Ides of March by Thornton Wilder, an epistolary novel about the assassination of Julius Caesar; The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers, about a deaf mute in the rural US state of Georgia; Miss Lonelyhearts by Nathanael West, a black comedy set in a New York newsroom; and Ronald Firbank’s Valmouth, a story of naughty centenarian ladies in a seaside resort on the south coast of England.
From the beginning the selection of titles was ‘bold, confident and international’. This is how Margaret Drabble would describe the series three decades later in 1992. Today, almost three decades later again, the series is still bold and confident, with increasingly international titles that introduce readers to the greatest writers of the last century.
The first jackets were designed by the typographer Hans Schmoller, who created a horizontal grid with an interchangeable palette of dove grey, orange, black and white. His design allowed space for bold, monochrome images and he used Eric Gill’s typeface Joanna.
Gill described Joanna as ‘free from all fancy business’. He was particularly fond of this typeface: he named it after his youngest daughter and selected it to set his 1931 monograph, An Essay on Typography – which joined the Modern Classics list itself in 2013.
In October 1963, the Penguin Art Director Germano Facetti refined the design: he retained the bluish-grey colour scheme of Schmoller’s original, but reset the covers using the ‘Marber Grid’, which was cleaner and allowed more space for artwork.
The Marber Grid was devised by the Polish designer Romek Marber for the Penguin crime covers, but it was so versatile it had already been adopted for Pelican and fiction titles too. Facetti wanted to alter the Modern Classics typeface, but initially Schmoller persuaded him to stick with Joanna.
It wasn’t until March 1966 that Facetti got his way. He replaced Joanna with Helvetica and pushed the title and author name further up the cover, to bring Modern Classics in line with the updated Penguin Classics design.
Helvetica is a Swiss typeface, developed by the Haas type foundry in the 1950s. It was originally called Haas Grotesk, but the more attractive name Helvetica was adopted in 1960, inspired by Helvetia, the Latin name for Switzerland.
The colour scheme became looser. The upper panel varied between white, black and trademark green-grey and in some cases disappeared altogether when the artwork filled the entire cover.
Having taken a while to settle down, the design of Penguin Modern Classics then remained unchanged for the next fifteen years.
In July 1981, the Penguin Modern Classics series was given a completely different look, by the new Art Director, Cherriwyn Magill. The books were larger: they had orange-and-white spines and white covers with an inset artwork, centred title and a Penguin logo perched below the overarching series name. In his book Penguin By Design, the critic Phil Baines describes this period, from a design point of view, as ‘the all-time low’.
The series got its next face-lift in May 1989. It was renamed ‘Twentieth-Century Classics’ and the back cover and spine became bright blue-green. Striking black and white photographs filled the front covers, with a floating Penguin logo in its own roundel and a moveable white title box with text in Sabon.
Sabon was designed by Jan Tschichold, the legendary Penguin typographer who preceded Hans Schmoller. Tschichold had been extremely influential at Penguin in the late 1940s, standardising in-house design and typography with a set of Penguin Compositional Rules. He based Sabon on a 15th-century French typeface by Claude Garamond.
As always, bold cover artwork was the principle feature of the Modern Classics design, and in January 1990 coloured images were added to the series. The design remained unchanged for the next decade.
With the arrival of the new millennium, however, the Twentieth-Century Classics required a new name.
In February 2000, under the supervision of Pascal Hutton, Art Director at Penguin Press, the series reverted to its original name, Penguin Modern Classics, and was given a new look by the designer Jamie Keenan.
The back cover and spines became glossy silver and the book title and author’s name were moved into a silver panel. Keenan’s intention was to use a variety of typefaces on the cover, but in practice only three were used: Franklin Gothic, Trade Gothic and Clarendon.
All three have American associations: Franklin Gothic and Trade Gothic were both created in the States, in 1902 and 1948 respectively, ‘gothic’ being an early 20th-century term for sans-serif. Clarendon is a thick, serif, 19th-century typeface, designed in London, commonly associated with ‘wanted’ posters from the American Old West.
Keenan’s design was refined in January 2004: a white band was added, running between the silver panel and the cover image, containing the Penguin logo and the words ‘MODERN CLASSICS’. This reflected the new design of the Classics series, which had been introduced the previous year.
The current Art Director, Jim Stoddart, gave Penguin Modern Classics its latest major makeover in September 2007. The back covers remained silver, but the books were now matte. The spines became white, matched by narrow white bands along the top and bottom of the front covers, which were otherwise completely filled by the artwork, superimposed with large silver and white lettering in Avant Garde.
Avant Garde was designed by the typographer Herb Lubalin. It developed from the logo of a New York magazine called Avant Garde, which was famous for sexual imagery, crude language and strikingly beautiful graphics. The magazine folded after just three years, when it printed an alphabet spelled out by nude models and the editor went to prison; but Lubalin’s logo was so popular, he subsequently worked it up into a full typeface and released it in 1970.
Stoddart’s grid remained loose. Depending on the artwork, the lettering could be large or small, and was sometimes relocated to a white panel at the top of the front cover
In February 2011, Penguin marked the 50th anniversary of Penguin Modern Classics with a selection of 50 ‘Mini Moderns’: small format extracts, short stories and novellas drawn from titles across the series. These mini books reflected the new design format, with white spines and matte silver covers, and were available singly or in a boxset.
A boxset of 50 Mini Modern Classics to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the series in 2011
These four titles are staples of Penguin Modern Classics and have all been through several different cover designs over the years. The cover of Animal Farm was designed by the illustrator and author Marion Deuchars
Truman Capote and John Steinbeck have also been mainstays of the Modern Classics list, but both authors are currently being refreshed with new images, of which these are the first examples
These titles demonstrate the range of Penguin Modern Classics, from the apocalyptic science fiction of Kurt Vonnegut to the surreal heights of Leonora Carrington
Modern Classics have always showcased the greatest writers who manage to capture the spirit of the age and challenge our understanding of what a classic can be. The design of the series has evolved to reflect the flavour of the list and will no doubt continue to develop of the next fifty years.