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player ready...“Penguin 75: Designers, Authors, Commentary (the Good, the Bad…)”
Edited and introduction by Paul Buckley
Foreword by Chris Ware
Penguin, $25, 254 pages
You’ll really be able to judge a book by its cover after spending a few hours with this celebration of Penguin Books’ 75th year. This is not an arid history of book design but one full of drama, as authors and designers talk about coming to agreement on a book’s cover. One has the sense that this would be a great reality TV show, as authors, designers and editors explain their feelings about how a cover came to be and how one was chosen over another. It’s full of funny stories such as how writer Melissa Bank loved the cover of her book “The Girls’ Guide to Hunting and Fishing” even though the art director said it looked like a J. Crew catalog, or how an intern ended up designing the cover of “Twitterature.” While many of the covers here are for new books, Penguin did republish some classics, with new, very contemporary covers, which can lead loyal readers to rethink a book, even one as well-known as “Little Women”: As Paul Buckley, Penguin’s executive vice president creative director, wrote, “I insisted on pimples, though … lots and lots of pimples.”