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The Sphinx

November 29, 2012, Filed Under: Books + Manuscripts

Notes from the Undergrad: The Penguin Illustrated Collapse

"A Farewell to Arms" by Ernest Hemingway. 1935. This edition of "A Farewell to Arms" was part of the initial ten-book print run of Penguin’s launch in 1935. Other titles in the series included Agatha Christie’s "The Mysterious Affair at Styles" and Dorothy Sayers’s "The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club." As you can see from this cover, Penguin paperbacks emphasized the company’s branding rather than the subject or author of the work; the original covers included the trademark drawing of the penguin but only rarely included illustrations pertaining to the book’s content. The covers were color-coded: orange for fiction, green for crime, and blue for non-fiction.

Alyssa O’Connell is an English Honors junior in Professor Janine Barchas’s seminar, “The Paperback,” in which students used the Ransom Center’s collections to research the history of paperbacks.

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