The Penguin Scores (1949-1956)

Between June 1949 and April 1956, Penguin Books published a series of beautiful music scores (see here for some nice photos). It took me around ten years to complete a collection - the challenge being to track them down in bookshops, rather than resorting to the internet. My biggest haul came at Edinburgh Books, somewhere behind the castle. It was also there that I picked up The Penguin Story,  released to celebrate the company's 21st birthday (June 1956). The Penguin Story contains a catalogue of the books released up to that point, including the 30 scores (there were no more published after that date).

Penguin's move into music publishing was part of a plan to extend the company's interests beyond their original remit of fiction and reprints, and to establish Penguin as the 'popular educator'.  In The Penguin Story, William Emrys Williams is haughtily evangelical about Penguin's mission to educate the common man:
'The dominant motive in the firm's endeavour is to provide good reading for people who have acquired a sound taste for books. For those who lack an habitual appetite for reading, Penguins have nothing to offer; they do not deal in those products which aim to excite and contaminate the mind with sensation and which could be more aptly listed in a register of poisons than in a library catalogue'. (1) The scores themselves were intended for 'the growing band of knowledgeable concert-goers and wireless listeners'. (2)

The scores were designed by Jan Tschichold (1902-74), a big figure in the Penguin story. Tschichold arrived in March 1947, and soon began a comprehensive overhaul of the company's design and typography. He was clearly a real stickler, and, in his determination to improve the sometimes sloppy work of his new colleagues, he ruffled a few feathers. Penguin founder Sir Allen Lane recalled that: 'nothing compared to storm when Jan Tschichold arrived. Mild-mannered man with an inflexible character. Screams heard from Edinburgh to Ipswich and from Aylesbury to Bungay'. (3) There is an excellent article by Richard Doubleday on Tschichold's years at Penguin. It details all of the design changes made at the time, and also examines and explains the introduction of Tschichold's 'Penguin Composition Rules', intended to unify design across the various Penguin series.

Penguin commissioned eight artists to provide the colourful backgrounds for the scores series. This page gives credit where it's due, and also gives details of how some designs were re-used for the Penguin Poets series (I'm sometimes tempted to start a collection, but they published a hundred of these). Exactly half of the background designs were by Elizabeth Friedlander, a German-born designer who came to England in 1939, and worked frequently for Penguin in the 40s and 50s. Friedlander was also the designer of an elegant font: 'Elizabeth'.

For the Penguin scores, Tschichold employed an update of a font originally designed by William Caslon (1692-1766), a giant of 18th century English publishing (4). Caslon fonts were also popular in the U.S.: the first mass-produced copies of the American Declaration Of Independence were printed in Caslon, while the New Yorker magazine still uses a version today. If you want to know much, much more, there is an admirably thorough article on Caslon through the ages here. 

(1) William Emrys Williams, The Penguin Story. Penguin Books, 1956, p.22
(2) Ibid. p. 21
(3) From a Guardian article
(4) Richard Doubleday identifies the font as Caslon Old Face, although others seem to think it may be Garamond.