In the early 2020s Penguin published a collection of Len Deighton books in covers that cleverly evoke the 1960s designs of Raymond Hawkey – see my post here. This large undertaking of 31 books, mostly spy novels and war stories, were published in the Modern Classics imprint. Undoubtedly some of them are modern classics even though they were originally released by popular fiction publishers.
Deighton’s first four novels, The IPCRESS File, Horse Under Water, and Funeral in Berlin and Billion Dollar Brain were published in the 1960s to critical aclaim and popular success. They were game-changers in the popular spy genre, dominated by Ian Fleming’s James Bond series. Deighton gave them a prosaic and working class tone, with bureaucratic tedium, office politics and the main character’s anti-establishment insolence. This was a more realistic world in contrast to the dashing sex and violence of 007. The first sentence of Billion Dollar Brain reads, “It was the morning of my hundredth birthday,” then continues on to describe his morning shaving ritual.
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Penguin art director and designer Jim Stoddart has steered the production of bold, graphic covers that combine coloured geometric shapes with black & white photographs.
The author has worked closely with Penguin Press art director Jim Stoddart on the publisher’s fresh set of jackets, which accompany the re-release of Deighton’s spy novels and non-fiction as Penguin Modern Classics. The design harks back to the original paperbacks created by Raymond Hawkey and feature black and white photography together with a two-colour stripe.
“Raymond Hawkey’s 60s covers use two very striking design motifs: the bold chevron graphics and the coarsely screened monochromatic photographs,” he adds. “It struck me that both these conceits were the gift that would allow us to create a distinctive Len Deighton look. Those two distinct graphic treatments also lend themselves to be extrapolated in countless different ways across Deighton’s canon, whether for his spy thrillers, his wartime cliff-hangers or his non-fiction history books.” , Creative Review
PENGUIN SERIES DESIGN 