Poetic covers for modern poets

Graphic use of photographs brought style to book covers

Penguin Modern Poets is a series of 27 poetry books published by Penguin Books in the 1960s and 1970s, each containing work by three contemporary poets. Each volume was to be “an attempt to introduce contemporary poetry to the general reader”.

The series had striking modern covers – black backgrounds with graphic black & white photographs full-bled. They were part of the reform, steered by art director Germano Facetti, to introduce a modernist cover regime across the different categories: fiction, non-fiction, classics etc. The Marber grid had shown the way in 1961/62 and the grid format was then applied in different ways throughout Penguin, including in Modern Poets.

The cover text was set in Univers, the new Swiss typeface, in condensed fonts, coloured for the authors names. Placement accommodated the individual photographs. The first series shown here are from 1962-65, and use black & white photographs or photograms by Roger Mayne, Peter Barrett and Alan Spain. 

The dominant black with cropped black & white photos type sent the message that each book was about “art”, that it was sort of an art object in itself. Compared to the earlier traditionally styled poetry imprints, this treatment was stylish and contemporary.

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Subsequent editions featured different forms of experimental photography including abstracts in acid colours but they were less elegant as a series than the black & whites. One of them, with a pop art cover by Alan Spain, was The Mersey Sound from 1967. It became one of the most successful poetry books ever published, with sales of 500,000! I was one one of those customers.