Old orange
Sep 14th, 2008 by Anne-Marie
Perfect book, perfect package …
My lounge-room is done out mostly in quiet and muted colours. I didn’t plan it that way, for I am no interior decorator, it just happened. Boldness of colour is provided by a bookshelf loaded mainly with old Penguin paperback novels: black spines for the Classics, orange for the rest. Penguin-orange. My eyes seek it out automatically in any second-hand bookshop or market. Most loved are the earliest editions, those with the two bands of orange top and bottom, cream in the middle. At the bottom is the famous figure of the penguin, “dignified but flippant”, drawn from life (in its original form) at the London zoo.
I buy second-hand Penguins by the barrow-load and I never mind if they have been marked. Penguins were a feature of my student life and I can recognise pre-owned student copies instantly. A recently bought copy of Camus’s Exile and the kingdom is neatly covered in tough plastic, as if expected to do duty for a younger brother or sister. Notes in the margin of The plague drift into absent-minded doodles, reminders of drowsy afternoons in hot classrooms 30 years ago. My own 17-year-old handwriting adorns my copy of a Penguin edition of Tolstoy’s long stories.
The availability of good books in cheap editions is a Good Thing, so I have always thought. I was intrigued, then, to read Andrew Riemer’s 1998 memoir, Sandstone gothic: confessions of an accidental academic. When Riemer began teaching English literature at the University of Sydney in the early 1960s, he noticed students coming to class with old, well-thumbed copies of the classics.
“They would bring collected volumes of Shakespeare bound in fading and cracked morocco leather”, he wrote, “inscribed in faint copperplate with the name of a mother, father aunt or grandmother, or squat editions of David Copperfield or Pride and prejudice bound in commensense, serviceable boards.” Unread perhaps by their original owners, they were, he thought, “emblems of continuity”, “something meaningful and significant”, giving a “sense of connection to a culture beyond the iron railings of the university”.
I am oddly moved by the idea of probably first generation university students (eager and earnest, Riemer implies, like his own student-self), arriving with old editions retrieved from dusty cupboards. I have one of those heirlooms, my grandmother’s Shakespeare, inscribed: “To Aunty Kit, with love from Claire, November 1947.” But never would I have taken it to university. Even as late as the 1980s I was part of the first generation of my family to attend university and the new Penguin editions, cheap, modern, and with all the scholarly apparatus a student could want, symbolised that for me.
Riemer noticed the cheap editions turning up to class later in his career but perceives that change differently. “[W]ith increasing and infuriating frequency,” he says, “[students] would arrive with nothing other than a notepad” - no texts at all - to learn about books “they had no intention of reading”. And so, he came to believe, the world had changed; “habits, rituals and practices we tried to maintain week after week … became hopelessly outmoded …”. The last decade of Riemer’s academic career was spent battling forces that undermined the notion of a literary ‘canon’. Why should everyone have to study Shakespeare? If Paradise lost or The faerie queen hold no appeal, so be it.
Penguin, meanwhile, seems to regard itself as an “emblem of continuity” and it re-badges and re-brands its editions, over and over, always with some reference to its sixpenny, railway platform, past. The latest effort is its “Popular Penguins“. Fifty titles, fiction and non-fiction, some classics, some not, have been re-printed using the original orange cover design. Each sells for a nostalgic $9.95 each. Jane Eyre dressed in orange is fine, and it’s nice to decide that I don’t need to buy the newly minted Love in a cold climate, by Nancy Mitford, because I already have a 1954 printing in the original Penguin cover. Nicely tattered and stained too.
But not all titles date from the era of old orange. Some of the 50 new reprints are books first published not that long ago and the result is exceedingly odd. I’m sorry, but I just can’t accept seeing Nick Hornby or Donna Tartt brought out in retro-editions like this. It is just too ridiculous. No doubt Penguin would argue that these are the sort of books it has always brought to a mass market and it would have published them in 1935 if they had been written then. But, well: pooh to that.
But there is something wrong here …
As a compromise I settled for Truman Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s. It was strange but nice to buy this old-new book.
Nearby was another “popular Penguin”, but I looked at it and thought: “Nah … maybe next time … “.
It was Anthony Burgess’s A clockwork orange.
5 Responses to “Old orange”
I have a very similar feeling about the banded Penguins (and have seen a fair few banded penguins in natural history docos, adding to the archive of avian-related knowledge), and when I was re-watching a DVD of an Inspector Morse episode on the weekend my eye went straight to a row of the classic orange-and-white covers on the snarly sleuth’s own bookshelves.
At some point, years ago, I had a green&white copy of Aldous Huxley’s travel memoir ‘Beyond the Mexique Bay’, and in the family home my parents had at least a few blue&white science volumes. I have a few of the black&white banded series too, and examples from the series with black spine and coloured tab.
Like you, I’m not convinced the publisher is really dong the post-orange-era works a favour by using the retro design for books like ‘The Secret History’, and may be better using the silver of the C20th Century Modern Classics series if they really feel a need to add icon value to re-prints of newer works.
cheers
Tim
Ah, but wasn’t green and white for crime fiction? I have a whole row of those (not in the lounge tho’ - wonder what that means?). Blue for biography, was it? Red for something else. Can’t remember. Black for classics, although I don’t think that was the original colour. The cover designs for the classics in the 60s and 70s became very sombre indeed. Rather off-putting although I suppose Morse would like them. The more recent designs still use a lot of black but are much more appealing and elegant I reckon.
Apart from black for classics and grey for “modern” classics, Penguin seems to have entirely dispensed with all this colour coding. A pity, if you are the sort of person to enjoy classification systems …
Hmmm, maybe - I’ll see if I get get hold of a definitive guide to the bands and related genres. Despite the wonders of research resources where I work [:)], I’ve never seen such a guide there. Bandoliers, sure, references to ‘band of brothers’ too, I suspect, but no Banded Penguins.
There was also a long-running Penguin series that used an orange spine regardless of fiction or non-fiction content or topic and featured varied illustrations on front covers -reproductions of engravings, paintings, photos etc that related to the specific book. Examples from my collection: my copy of Thackeray’s ‘Vanity Fair’ (1968, 1970s reprints) has a chaotic and colourful caricature titled: “a swarm of English Bees Hiving in the Imperial Carriage” -Regency era, I think, or not long after it; a 1983 edition of Thoreau’s ‘Walden’ [which I now really want to re-read after very recently coming back from Blue Mts, where thinking about his nature writing makes so much sense] has a more sombre salon-style painting of a woman representing Liberty -she is feeding an eagle and holding a flag; 1995 (new translation) “Definitive Edition” of Anne Frank’s diary simply has a 1941 b&w photo of AF on front cover.
Can this specialised interest be convincingly described as biblioheraldry? Or is it a definitively ‘tragic’ action to even try?
T
I know precisely the edition of Vanity Fair that you mean. It’s a regular sight in good 2/hand bookshops. When I was a student in the 1980s Penguin went through a phase of bringing out that sort of book in its “Penguin English Library” series (or something like that). Orange spines, as you say. I think I have a George Eliot or two from this era.
This interest is indeed getting a little tragic, and we haven’t even got on to the evolution over the years of the picture of the penguin. I have just one precious volume with the dancing penguin on the front. My favourite.
AM/Mme Blogger,
Can’t surpass the dancing penguin, but suggest that Allen & Unwin’s logo - featuring a cockatoo-like bird holding a magnifying glass in one claw - does have a way of catching the eye (though not on end of a talon, thankfully). Tragic-level detail: this logo is shown on spine in a different form, comprising just a side view of the bird’s head, with beak facing to left side, consistent with left-side silhouette for main logo.
A quick look at some other bird-related publisher’s logos represented on my shelves turned up: a bantam (Bantam -US), a sea bird -possibly a tern (Norton -US), a puffin (Puffin -US, UK), an eagle (Halstead Press, Oz), a phoenix (Phoenix Press -US), Black Swan (imprint of a UK firm), owl (Barrie Jenkins -UK, limited ed. specialist).
O….K. Time to de-virtualise/log off and and read a novel that does NOT feature a bird logo on cover. The choice: Matthew Condon’s epic ‘The Trout Opera’, published by Vintage, who simply use their own name. Condon’s story is my next book group novel.
cheers
Tim