Everybody loves to celebrate their anniversary, and it seems that book publishers are no exception. Every Gregorian milestone is an excuse to put out a limited edition set of books to mark the occasion, and commission some great book design in the process.
For example, to mark Penguin's 70th Anniversary back in 2005, they released a limited edition set of 70 books, each book being a new text, specially selected for the occasion by one of Penguin's most popular and/or significant authors from their back catalogue spanning the last 70 years. The stories/texts themselves are interesting enough, some of them very much so, but in my opinion the best thing about the set is the design. As well as having 70 different famous authors to write the books, Penguin also asked 70 different illustrators and designers to create the front covers. The result is that almost every book has a great, and unique design.
Here are a few of my favourite covers:
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The books come in a presentation box, (although it's a bit flimsy to be honest), and each spine is a different colour, so that when lined up on the bookshelf they form a rainbow gradient, something I usually despise, but I think in this case it works.
There were only a limited number of sets produced, and like so many books in Penguin's back catalogue, they have become quite a collectors item. Nowadays sets of the books occasionally pop up on eBay for around five times their original retail price.
So, Penguin marked their 70th anniversary with some great, not to mention highly collectable, book cover design, but then good design is something I have come to expect from Penguin, and I've blogged about their Great Ideas books on here before. For part two of my trio of articles on book cover design, I'll take a look at Faber & Faber and how they tackled the issue of designing a set of special books to mark their 80th anniversary.
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Books + Anniversaries = Good Design
Part I: Penguin
Part II: Faber & Faber
Part III: Weidenfeld & Nicolson
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