Viva Lewes Issue #139 April 2018

Photo by Sam Moore
John Hamilton
Penguin Essentials Art Director
20 Years of Penguin Essentials at Ditchling
Museum of Art + Craft is a collection of 100
book covers brought together by esteemed Art
Director John Hamilton. The show runs until
29th April, in partnership with their Elizabeth
Friedlander exhibition that includes her ornate
re-workings of the Penguin logo for the
publisher’s 25th Anniversary.
The Essentials were never intended as a formal
body of work, says John, but reviewing them in
curating the show has revealed something of a
‘holding look’.
The full collection of over 150 titles grew out of
his idea to bring special editions of modern literary
classics to a new generation of book buyers.
They encapsulate the major overhaul John has led
at Penguin since he joined twenty years ago - a
period of change that offered the chance to throw
away the design conventions of his predecessors.
“When I started, they basically said: ‘you’ve got
a free hand to do what you want,’” says John. “I
looked at the backlist - Kerouac, Orwell - it was just
mind-blowing. I thought, how do we sell this to a
new young audience?”
The answer was to pair famous titles with young,
punky artists and designers whose work John found
in magazines like ID, The Face and on album covers.
A commission for design agency Intro off the
back of their work for Primal Scream helped to
consolidate the approach. “I thought, this is the way
forward,” says John. “I sat down with my designers
and said, ‘we’ve got to do this differently.’”
The net was cast wider and wider, to include
tattooists and street artists like Banksy and Cleon
Peterson. “The internet,” says John, “for me, it was
like a painter having four colours and then all of a
sudden 200.”
“I wanted to press buttons with a whole new
audience, so we got Stanley Donwood when he was
doing OK Computer, and Banksy…”
The cover Banksy created for Nick Cave’s And
the Ass Saw the Angel features a reworking of the
Penguin logo exhaling flames that John just slipped
through the eight-person approval process.
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