Penguin Classics Spine Design

I collect Penguin Classics. Spines on my shelf create a band of color telling me exactly which era of publishing each book came from, because Penguin has used consistent color coding since Allen Lane founded the press in 1935. Orange spines are fiction, green are crime, blue are nonfiction, and black are the Classics series with the medallion illustration on each cover. Those medallion covers started in 1946. Each shows a different historical image related to the text. The combination of black spine, cream lettering, and small oval illustration creates a format so recognizable you can identify a Penguin Classic from across a room. I pick up copies at used bookstores whenever I find one with a good cover illustration. I'm building a shelf of them not just for reading but as visual objects. Paper in the older editions is thicker and slightly yellowed. The ink has a smell newer printings don't have, sharp and slightly sweet, like a dry attic. Monotype Bembo, a typeface originally cut in 1495, is the font on the covers. Penguin's choice to use a Renaissance-era font for their classical literature series communicates historical continuity without being heavy-handed. About 30 Penguin Classics sit on my shelf now, the most visually coherent part of my room: a row of black and cream with small bursts of illustration that reward close looking.