James Pardey writes:
I have recently launched a website which may be of interest to SFScope readers. It’s called The Art of Penguin Science Fiction.
The purpose of the website is to complement a series of articles I have written on the history and cover art of science fiction published by Penguin Books (UK) from 1935 to 1977.
As such the website is primarily intended to be a visual experience (there are over 150 Penguin sf covers, which Penguin has granted me a license to use) with the articles going into more detail about the sf itself.
My main area of interest is the linkage between modern science fiction—by which I mean Jules Verne and H.G. Wells onward—and twentieth-century art (abstraction, surrealism, Pop, etc.). Where Penguin comes into this is that in the 1960s they launched an sf series with covers by the Italian designer Germano Facetti. But instead of using pictures of aliens, rocket ships, and bug-eyed monsters, Facetti chose reproductions of paintings by Max Ernst, Paul Klee, Yves Tanguy, Joan Miro, and Rene Magritte, to name a few. Why? Well, each painting was carefully chosen to tie in with some aspect of the book’s contents, and it is these connections that form the heart of the website and the articles that I’ve written to accompany it. But the articles and website only go so far. There is quite a bit more to the story, such as the links between J.G. Ballard and surrealism, Jules Verne and the Belgian surrealist Paul Delvaux, Delvaux and Ballard, etc., and I am planning to examine this in some talks and further articles.
Incidentally, instead of starting in the 1960s, I decided that both the website and articles should start at the beginning, when Penguin was founded in 1935. I did this in order to tell “the whole story” since the early orange-and-white banded covers of Penguin books have since become regarded as design classics and, to many people, miniature modernist artworks in their own right. And after the sf series in the 1960s, the influence of Pop Art and Op Art can be seen in the later Penguin sf covers by Alan Aldridge and Franco Grignani, while those by David Pelham have also achieved iconic status.
With so many covers on the front page, be warned that the site does take a little while to load.