Robert Jonas and the American Penguins

Allen Lane, founder of Penguin Books, hated illustrated book covers and fought against them in his company. He feared that introducing illustrations would infect the dignified Penguin brand with “bosoms and bottoms.”

In the US, paperbacks were sold on news stands and had to compete with newspapers and magazines so typographic covers like the English Penguins would be lost in the riot of colour and sensation.

A director of the American Penguin operation, Kurt Enoch, hired a young artist named Robert Jonas to design some early covers. He soon became a regular and eventually gave the US brand its characteristic look.

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Jonas had been deeply involved in the New York avant-garde in the 1930s, just before it burst on the international scene. He was editor of an art journal and was a friend of Willem de Kooning and Arshile Gorky, both to become leading Abstract-Expressionist painters in the 1940s.

In the 1940s he made his living as a commercial artist for US Penguin and stayed on when it became New American Library, publishers of Signet and Mentor paperbacks. He designed many covers for these imprints until 1955 when he left to design for hardcovers.

Jonas was a dominant and successful cover artist. He developed an idea and projected it powerfully without getting trapped in compromise. His designs worked year after year.”  (Bantam art director Gobin Stair)

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Though he was a flexible commercial artist and could work in many styles, his most recognizable work has a flavour of modern art, showing the influence of Surrealism, Cubism and Art Deco. Each cover has a striking visual idea which is quickly grasped by the viewer, as in a poster. His colleague James Avati stated that “his covers were very simple technically speaking, but they had an enormous psychological power.”

The artistry of Jonas’ covers gave American Penguin a degree of modernity when compared to other more populist US brands such as Dell or Pocket Books. They must have played some small part in explaining modern art aesthetics to the then conservative American population.

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