Learn more about penguin books:
http://www.abebooks.com/books/RareBooks/penguin-publishers-color-jacket-design/stripes-rainbow
.shtml
All the
Colors of
Penguin Books
You can find these little orange
Penguin paperbacks in secondhand bookshops around the world. Penguin, founded in 1935, revolutionized marketing and publishing by producing these inexpensive softcovers with their instantly recognizable design.
Orange is the most famous color associated with Penguin but there was whole spectrum of colors to distinguish
Penguin books.
•
Green indicated crime novels
• Cerise (or pink if you will) was for travel and adventure
•
Dark blue for biographies
• Red for drama
•
Purple for essays
•
Yellow was for miscellaneous titles, like crosswords, that did not fit into any of other categories
• And there was also grey for world affairs
Of the first 10
Penguins published in 1935 were six were orange, two were dark blues and two were greens.
Now you might ask -- what about the light blue books?
Light blue was the color used by
Pelican Books -- an imprint, or division, of Penguin dedicated to non-fiction.
Penguin also briefly issued Ptarmigan
Books, devoted to puzzles and word games, and they came with a quite distinct bloated bird on the brown cover.
And the other famous P associated with Penguin is Puffin -- still going strong and one of the world's biggest publishers of children's books.
Penguin also produced
Peacock Books, which catered for young adult readers
And that famous Penguin striped cover design itself?
Did you know it was created by a 21-year-old office junior called
Edward Young who also came up with the main Penguin logo.
And if you look carefully at a pile of Penguins, you will notice the logo often varies from a plain penguin looking left to a merry penguin dancing to the right to a pair of penguins, wing-in-wing also dancing, and then there are penguin books with the bird looking one way on the cover and then another bird looking the other on the spine.
http://www.abebooks.com/books/RareBooks/penguin-publishers-color-jacket-design/stripes-rainbow.shtml
Even more reading about Penguin:
http://www.abebooks.com/books/publisher-lady-chatterleys-lover-75-anniversary/penguin-publishing.shtml
http://www.abebooks.com/books/bodley-head-hemingway-christie-sayers/penguin.shtml
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- published: 23 Apr 2013
- views: 10504