— Ch. 1 · Founding And Early Editors —
Penguin Classics.
~4 min read · Ch. 1 of 6
The first Penguin Classic appeared in 1946 with E. V. Rieu's translation of The Odyssey. Rieu became the general editor and sought out literary novelists like Robert Graves and Dorothy Sayers to translate texts. He believed these writers would avoid "the archaic flavour and the foreign idiom that renders many existing translations repellent to modern taste". This approach set a high standard for readability while maintaining scholarly integrity. In 1964, Betty Radice and Robert Baldick succeeded Rieu as joint editors. Radice eventually took sole control in 1974 and served for 21 years. She argued for scholarship within popular editions and modified the plain text convention by adding line references, bibliographies, maps, explanatory notes, and indexes. Her work broadened the canon of 'Classics' while encouraging diverse readership without sacrificing academic standards.
Evolution Of Book Design
Penguin Books recruited German typographer Jan Tschichold in 1947 to create minimalist covers for the series. Italian art director Germano Facetti joined in 1961 to modernize the look into what became known as "Black Classics". These books featured black covers with artwork appropriate to the topic and period of the work. A major revision occurred in 1985 when pale yellow covers replaced the black ones, though they retained black spines color-coded with small marks. Red indicated English works, purple denoted ancient Latin and Greek, yellow marked medieval and continental European languages, and green covered other languages. The entire catalogue received another redesign in 2002 that restored the black cover but added a white stripe and orange lettering. This change followed a more prescribed template allowing faster copyediting and typesetting while reducing options for individual design variations. In 2019, Jim Stoddart redesigned the cover again swapping Mrs Eaves lettering for an unitalicized sans-serif font and replacing signature orange author names with white for uniformity.