Sam Taylor-Wood
Tender Is the Night by F Scott Fitzgerald
I first read Tender Is the Night while I was at college. It is one of those books that you read and feel a shift. Trying to choose your favourite novel is always difficult, but when I thought about which novel to design a cover for, Tender Is the Night shot to mind as one that had inspired me early on. What really resonates with me is how the story opens with this decadent, glamorous lifestyle and spirals into the demise of the central character, Dick Diver, and all those around him. As the novel unfolds you see the other characters - Rosemary, the young girl Dick Diver falls in love with, his wife Nicole and his crazy friend Abe North - all threatening to pull him down. But in the end, he is mainly responsible for his own downfall. When you begin to read it, you think it is all going to be about Rosemary, and then Nicole, but essentially it is all about Dick and how he is the maker of his undoing, as he descends into alcoholism. I reread it this summer, and the story is told so poetically and eloquently. It is one of those books that you read and think: if I could only remember that sentence - it is so beautiful.
I think a lot of my work has that sense of decadence, with an under-lying turbulence or unease, which is so powerful in the novel. My cover is a photograph I took of the writer Harland Miller, who features in quite a lot of my work. I knew the photographs I could take of him would be very Dick Diverish. It is a simple black and white photograph of him in a cream Riviera-style suit, with his head hung low. Harland loves the book, too, and he was very happy to be Dick Diver. He has made paintings that are reworkings of Penguin Classics, so it was lovely to put him on one of the covers. They are classic and iconic - all the titles you really want to read. I'm so excited to see the book out. I love it.
Manolo Blahnik
Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
I love Penguin. I had the orange and white paperbacks on my shelf when I was a boy in the Canary Islands, so I have a strong affection for them. As a child I used to hear my mother say how wonderful Flaubert was, and Madame Bovary was her favourite of his novels, so I read it when I was about 12, but didn't enjoy it that much at all. Later, when I was living in Geneva, I saw a wonderful movie of L'Éducation sentimentale that pushed me to read Madame Bovary again, and I was absolutely enchanted by it. It gave me an incredible passion for Flaubert's writings. Madame Bovary is particularly attractive to me because it is a very dramatic story, with this woman's incredible desire, and a compulsion to dress all the time. She didn't have much money and had to borrow from the draper, but she spent everything she had on wonderful, beautiful textiles and dresses. It is something that a modern woman can understand.
Doing illustrations for books isn't familiar terrain to me, but I love challenges. My cover is a picture of a lady with a man's hands stretching from behind a curtain to touch her lovely bottom. She is dressed in a wonderful chiffon peignoir, or dressing-gown, and mules - like the slippers ladies put on before they went to bed in those days. It's a fun cover. Maybe I should have been more respectful, done a more solemn drawing in homage to Flaubert - but it isn't a solemn novel. My design was inspired by the golden era of English drawing typified by Cecil Beaton and Oliver Messel. I tried to remember the kind of illustrations that Beaton did in the 1940s to 1960s, like those for Nancy Mitford's Don't Tell Alfred, and this is what I tried to re- create. At the same time, I tried to make it like a cheap novelette from nowadays. I don't know if it is very good or not, but I quite like it.
Fuel - Stephen Sorrell and Damon Murray
Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
We have been interested in Russian culture since visiting Moscow for an early Fuel project in 1992. We have recently designed and published two books about Russian culture, one featuring home-made household objects (Home-Made: Contemporary Russian Folk Artifacts by Vladimir Arkhipov) and the other on Russian criminal tattoos (Russian Criminal Tattoo Encyclopedia, Volume II by Danzig Baldaev). Dostoyevsky is one of the quintessential Russian writers, who asks all the big questions while laying his characters bare in the most readable way.
The central character in Crime and Punishment, Raskolnikov, is constantly questioning both his psychological and physical boundaries. This is reflected in our approach to the "cover" - made from the same material as the inside stock, it is as fragile and open as the pages. The design echoes the tension and intensity of the writing, the back-cover optical illusion being a visual representation of Raskolnikov's battle with the voice of his conscience. The brown craft paper used throughout the book gives a sense of the gritty St Petersburg locations and poverty that Dostoyevsky described.
Russia itself has a major role in the book, and we wanted to remind readers of the book's original language by including the title and author in Cyrillic type as well as English.
Paul Smith
Lady Chatterley's Lover by DH Lawrence
Penguin said I had to choose from its Classics collection, and frankly I could have chosen 10 or more titles. But I leaned towards Lady Chatterley's Lover because DH Lawrence came from Nottinghamshire, the same county as me. I have visited where he used to live and the little museum there. I read the book many many years ago - I think when I was a teenager. It was, of course, an extremely outrageous thing to read at that time, so I probably had to hide it. I didn't have time to read it again, so I tried to remember the most important bits. I think it is a tender, not vulgar, book, a very romantic novel, so I chose the scene where Mellors decorates her with flowers to illustrate the cover. It is a very lovely scene. That was the start of it.
As a designer of clothes, I work with fabric, so I had the idea of creating a silk cover. Every part of it is associated with my trade: the title, Lawrence's name and the Penguin symbol are all embroidered. The pubic hair is made up of little silk-embroidered lilac and purple forget-me-nots. It is very beautiful. We were allowed to choose the typeface, so it is all very much in keeping. We are very familiar with making brochures and catalogues, and so on, but this is the first book I have ever designed.
The new Designer Classics are being launched in my shop in Notting Hill, and each book will be displayed in a different room so as to draw attention to them individually. I'm a regular visitor to Portobello market and I often see Penguin paperbacks on stalls there. They are so distinctive: I love the way, as they get older, they have a slightly dipped-in-tea look about them.
Ron Arad
The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
I chose The Idiot without even thinking about it. I didn't even have to choose it - it selected itself. I first read it when I was 16 or 17, and I've never read a book like it since. It was mind-blowing: the title, the expectations it creates in a 16-year-old boy, and then you meet this amazing character. He's nothing but an idiot. It is very bleak - but such is life.
Unfortunately the novel I read came with a cover - a black and white portrait. You have a job getting rid of the image and having your own, un-influenced vision, and the reader resents this. This led to my first decision, which was not to have a cover image at all - just to say "The Idiot" and "Dostoyevsky" and go straight to the story, to get on the train immediately. Also, we tend to pick up a book and look at the back, so there's no back cover either. Let the book be its own cover.
When I had the meeting with Penguin I presumed we were talking about paperbacks, but I realised that what they had in mind was a luxurious hardback, and for every book to be presented in an acrylic slipcase. I thought, fine, but can I stick to the paperback?
The format of my book is different from everybody else's, but the acrylic case is the same. It's very difficult to avoid inventing things, so I made the case out of a Fresnel lens. It has concentric grooves, and the effect is like that of a big magnifying glass. Because the lens is tight to the cover, it distorts the book to a pyramid shape - at the front page of the book you can also see all four edges, creating something of a reverse perspective, with the last page a lot bigger than the front page. This gave me the opportunity to do graphics on the edges of the book. On the top page I wrote "The Idiot", handwritten white on black; on the long right-hand side I wrote "Dostoyevsky"; and on the bottom I did a hand-drawn version of the Penguin Classics logo. On the spine I exposed all the threads that bind the book together. When you lift the lid of the box, the book grows, and you can actually use the box as a magnifying glass to read the novel if you want to.
I'm very happy that despite introducing lots of tricks, if you like, to the design of the book, I stayed true to my original idea of having no front or back cover. When you have transparent layers on something, they interact with whatever that thing is - sometimes you can post-rationalise it, sometimes it is random and has its own beauty.
I design anything, from very small things to buildings. I'm not a graphic designer: graphics, for us, is the means, not the final product. Images are the first step in everything I do. I did do a drawing of how the book might look, what effect the lens might have, but I think I got better than I expected - not wanting, in this case, to improve something that is very difficult to improve upon. Paul Smith has dressed his book up - that's what he does. I've stripped mine.