Penguin flogs it (and sells some books)

What's the most depressing piece of Penguin merchandising? Notebooks featuring the classic covers of much-loved titles that cost more than the novels themselves

• Anthony Cummins, guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 4 November 2009

Left - a reader at the Guardian Hay Festival. Photograph: Martin Godwin

Few publishers are brands the way Penguin is a brand. Launched in 1935, its fame owes much to its earliest titles: their covers, that is, rather than the texts themselves. The trademark uniform – two coloured stripes and black Gill Sans lettering – lasted three decades before being dropped for the sake of greater variety. But you don't have to visit a second-hand book shop to see examples of the design. Resurrected in time for Penguin's 70th birthday in 2005, it's now a familiar sight on official merchandise that includes bags, mugs, tea towels and deck chairs. You can carry your groceries in The Lost Girl, drink from Vile Bodies, dry the dishes with A Room of One's Own, and lean back on Brighton Rock. As a promotional website tells us.

Across all generations and types of people, the Penguin range strikes such a chord that they may now be truly considered part of our literary, lifestyle culture.

Lifestyle: always an odd word when used as a modifier. The New Oxford says it means "products designed to appeal to a consumer by association with a desirable lifestyle". While I can't imagine who buys wall canvases of 1930s Penguins at a hundred quid a pop – enlighten me – or even what lifestyle they are supposed to evoke, it seems pretty obvious that the famous three-stripe design is now intended for a market that's somewhat different from its original audience.

To recap: the publisher Allen Lane set up Penguin to try to increase the numbers of people able to afford good books. In paperback editions priced 6d (two and a half pence) – "same as a packet of cigarettes" – he reprinted quality fiction and non-fiction and ensured their availability not only at bookseller s but also at railway stations and tobacconists. With launch titles including works such as Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms and André Maurois's biography of Shelley, Ariel, Lane brought respectability to a sector of the market that had been regarded with suspicion since the arrival of something resembling a British education system in 1870.

The full story at The Guardian online.