Penguin’s story started in 1935 with the simple idea that quality literature shouldn’t cost more than a packet of cigarettes. Despite scepticism from publishers and booksellers, when founder Allen Lane launched his publishing company he sparked a paperback revolution in the UK. Within a year, three million Penguins had made it to readers’ shelves.

Fast-forward 90 years, and Penguin’s mission – to make books for everyone – remains the same. To mark its milestone anniversary in 2025, the publisher’s new Penguin Archive series draws from its expansive archive with 90 short books.

Curated by 16 Penguin Classics editors, the series takes readers through nine decades of literature, spanning authors from Jane Austen to Wang Xiaobo and settings ranging from ancient battlefields, to haunted graveyards, all the way to outer space.

Each title in the series comes with a simple but striking cover design that also riffs on Penguin’s heritage. “For this year’s birthday we wanted to create a love letter from Penguin Classics to Penguin Books,” says art director Jim Stoddart. “We wanted to celebrate Penguin as a whole – ie Penguin since its inception in 1935 – and to not just celebrate the quality and range of authors published by Penguin but also to mark 90 years of Penguin’s book design.”

The very first Penguin books to be published in the 1930s became well-known for their modernist covers, using vivid colours to champion different genres. Since then, design has continued to play a big role in the publisher’s output.

“During the early stages of deciding whether to publish 90 books for Penguin’s 90th birthday, I trawled through the Penguin archive to see whether I could perhaps find a design to represent each decade – maybe the tri-band design for the first ten years, and so on,” says Stoddart. “But my list of favourite covers from Penguin’s past quickly expanded, and it became clear to me that I could create 90 unique covers, one for each book, with the design of each chiming with the year each author was first published by Penguin.”

In the spirit of early printing processes, the team decided to only use one colour. Continuing the love letter theme, red foil – otherwise known as the colour of passion – was the natural choice to be stamped onto naked cover boards, while the rest of the design choices lent themselves to the story, author and the time period when each book was originally published.

“Designing the Penguin Archive series has been an extensive fever dream of books covers old and new,” says Stoddart. “Using typography as the medium to evoke different Penguin eras, we’ve reprised the creativity of many legendary designers involved with creating Penguin’s visual legacy, from those first tentative covers and hand-drawn logos to the highest evocation of type and book design. It’s been a privilege standing on the shoulders of these design giants to rekindle much-loved and often iconic book covers from the last 90 years.”

 

Penguin Classics’ Penguin Archive series will be published on April 17; penguin.co.uk