New-look books from Penguin's Vintage division

A bibliophile shares his early fascination with Penguin paperback design and hails a new chapter in the imprint’s cover story

Random House books
Three of Vintage's redesigned classics
(Image credit: Penguin Random House)

I first fell in love with the art of paperback covers at school in the 1970s. I had always adored books and had been brought up in a house packed to the rafters with them – and, much to my partner's annoyance, I still live in a home like that.

The vast majority of the paperbacks on my father's shelves that I was interested in reading were the classic, colour-coded Penguin books created by graphic designer Edward Young for the imprint's founder, Allen Lane. One of Young's first jobs was being dispatched to London Zoo to sketch penguins to create the publisher's logo. When he returned to the office, he reportedly complained, "My God, how those birds stink!"

Thanks to Young's subsequent coding, when I reached up to choose my next read, it was simple to spot the genre – green for my favourite crime writers such as Josephine Tey and Margery Allingham; orange for general fiction such as Evelyn Waugh and, ahem, D.H. Lawrence's "Lady Chatterley's Lover".

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To create the new cover designs, Vintage has commissioned an impressive roster of artists, photographers and illustrators from around the world, such as the Chilean Diego Becas ("The Savage Detective" by Roberto Bolaño), the American artist Idris Habib ("Native Son" by Richard Wright) and Whooli Chen from Taiwan ("The Joy Luck Club" by Amy Tan).

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is a doctor and freelance journalist. He was an executive producer for Lifetime Television in New York and medical adviser for the Millennium Dome Body Zone.