If he got the go ahead, he’d do the woodcut the following Saturday in his Battersea digs. Gentleman describes how – for a woodcut to illustrate a volume of Maupassant stories, for example – he would hurriedly read the stories during the week, do a rough draft illustration on Saturday, and post it off to Penguin. I’ll focus on just one contribution – that of the great (and aptly named) David Gentleman, whose earliest illustrations for Penguin date from the very early 1950s. The book is lavishly illustrated – much more so than I can do justice to here. It makes for a delightfully unstuffy, chatty and spontaneous book in which illustrators talk about the often iconic work they produced for Penguin during the house’s glory years. The book is made up of five presentations given by illustrators on the day, and twenty or so short essays from others.

This event brought together contributions from twenty-eight illustrators who reflect on the work they produced for Penguin – whether strictly as illustrators or, as Penguin apparently encouraged in some cases, as illustrators-cum-designers, working up not just the cover graphic but the whole cover artwork and conception.

This can be seen as a companion volume to Phil Baines’ Penguin by Design (published by Penguin Books in 2005) but is actually a record of the proceedings of a day-long seminar of Penguin illustrators at the V&A on the 27th March 2007. Given the nature of the Letterpress Project and its glorification of the book as physical object it seems extraordinary that the marvellous Penguin by Illustrators (Penguin Collectors Society 2009) hasn’t yet been covered.

Penguin by Design by Phil Baines