Penguin By Illustrators Review
Show And Tell
For ‘show and tell’ at conferences to be more than, ‘then I did this, then I did that’, the ‘show-er’ needs to be a good storyteller or provide a wider historical context. Penguin By Illustrators does both. This collection of papers given at the Victoria and Albert Museum in 2007, showcases work by figures such as David Gentlemen, Jan Pieńkowski and Romek Marber that demonstrate the evolution of Penguin, and its emergence as a significant force in post-war British culture. Many of these illustrators were also doing work for The Listener, The Economist, New Society or the Royal Mail, and were forging a vision and idea of modernity. The idea of modernity is a sub-text throughout the book, and the aura of modernity in Penguin was established by Romek Marber’s grid.
Marber had done innovative covers for The Economist in the early 1960s, and Germano Facetti, the recently appointed Penguin Art Director, got in touch. In 1961 Marber developed the grid for the Penguin Crime series, which would later be exported to Penguin Fiction and Pelican. The grid gave the impressions of rationalism and order, while also inviting illustrators to play with the rules, very 1960s. Take for example Marber’s cover for Murder In Pastiche by Marion Mainwaring. Marber pastiches his own rules, visually ripping up the cover, encroaching the different areas of the grid, showing you the rules of the grid while breaking them. If this were a piece of random illustration or had little to do with the novel inside you would forgive the creative indulgence out of simple admiration for Marber’s audacity. But this reprint of Marion Mainwaring’s novel is a pastiche of detective fiction and characters such as Mike Hammer, Hercule Poirot and Ellery Queen, and imitates the each author’s prose style. Marber’s deconstruction of his own style, his own grid, can’t be bettered as an example of visual thinking.
Marber recounts how after a break of a number of years he was asked back to create covers for six Angus Wilson novels, but by then there were few rules organising cover layouts, the title and author’s name could be in any typeface and the illustration could be placed anywhere on the page. He laments the ‘blearing’ of the Penguin identity.
In time the brand identity of the author would take centre-stage and illustration would become even more important. To prove this, go into a bookshop and note whether you can avoid Jon Gray’s illustrations for Jonathan Safran Foer. The hand-painted lettering, the words squeezed in on the cover or bleeding over onto the spine, the sheer visual mess, are an unmistakable typographic helter-skelter. Gray found an old book on hand-painted signage where the personality of the artist comes through by being ‘unskilled, innocent, unaware of space or styling,’ explains Gray, ‘not trying to convey anything apart from their message. They seem to be a direct link to the character who painted them. This seemed a good way to represent the narrator Alex, whose broken English is central to the book.’ As much as they are central to the book, Gray’s artwork has become synonymous with the author.
Steve Hare who collated the material has put together a rigorous, historical document, which offers unexpected pleasures such as Len Deighton’s entry, who it turned out was not only the author of The Ipcress File, but an anthologist, designer and illustrator. Deighton says he became an ‘artist of last resort’ facing ferocious deadlines, but he makes the case for the medium of illustration. ‘The advantage of using commissioned illustrations comes from the artist’s skill and experience,’ argues Deighton. ‘While cover illustrations and books can vary immensely, photographs will always resemble other photographs. What photograph can equal the drawings by Paul Hogarth for Graham Greene and George Orwell, the ones that David Gentleman did for C.P. Snow’s books, Romek Marber’s covers for Simenon? Aided by Penguin’s orange, blue and green categorisation bands, such commissioned illustrations added up to a sound marketing policy.’ With reflective and revealing contributions from 36 illustrators from over half a century of book publishing, Penguin By Illustrators is a rewarding account of a unique slice of illustration history.
John O’Reilly, Varoom 11, Winter 2009