P-P-P-P-Pick up a Penguin!

I'v just received six books from the Penguin Great Ideas series - 80 (so far) short books of essays by prominent intellectuals. I already owned Marcus Aurelius's Meditations in this edition, and I've added Walter Benjamin's The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Orwell's Books v. Cigarettes, Why I Write and Decline of the English Murder, William Morris's Useful Work v. Useless Toil, and Michel Foucault's The Spectacle of the Scaffold.

To be honest, I've got most of these texts in one form or another, and most are available for free on the web (follow the links above). I bought them because these slim volumes are masterpieces of book design. Each one evokes the spirit and sense of the text: the Foucault features repetitive circles representing the atomised individual under the microscope of social institutions.

Why I Write features a spare, plain cover with an austere typeface reflecting Orwell's suspicion of rhetoric.

The Morris merges art and craft in line with his philosophy that anything which is useful is necessarily beautiful (he clearly never worked in the lower reaches of higher education).

The Decline of the English Murder is a deeply embossed tabloid newspaper, complete with adverts,

Books v. Cigarettes has an abstract design which reminds me of ashtrays and Venn diagrams, from the 1950s/1960s designs:

while Benjamin's essay, which is about what happens to our definitions of art when artworks can be reproduced to infinity, features the spine of the book repeated over and over again, which I think is very witty.

Penguins were invented in 1935 by Allen Lane (influenced by various other imprints) to make high quality books available for about the price of a packet of cigarettes. Design and typography were hugely important to the company, for themselves and as a way of distinguishing the texts from other cheap books. You can still buy the originals for pennies everywhere: green for detective novels, blue for biography, orange for fiction and so on. Even if you can't read, they do furnish a room!