Quick answer: The colours on classic Penguin paperbacks were a filing system, not decoration. Orange meant general fiction, green meant crime, dark blue meant biography, cerise meant travel and adventure, red meant drama, purple meant essays, yellow meant miscellaneous and grey meant world affairs. Light blue belonged to Pelican, Penguin's non-fiction sister imprint, launched in 1937. The whole point was that you could read a shelf from the other side of the shop and know what you were looking at before you picked anything up.
The sixpenny experiment
In 1935, Allen Lane launched Penguin Books on a proposition that the rest of British publishing thought was daft: good writing, properly made, for sixpence. The same price as a packet of cigarettes. Booksellers were unconvinced, and the first order that made the whole thing viable famously came not from a bookshop but from Woolworths.
The origin story Penguin tells is that Lane, travelling home from a visit to Agatha Christie, found himself stuck on the platform at Exeter St Davids with nothing worth reading on sale. It is a lovely story and it comes from Lane himself, which is worth remembering — it is his recollection rather than a documented event, and it has had ninety years of polishing. Treat it as the company's founding myth and it holds up nicely either way.
What is not in dispute is the problem he was solving. Cheap paperbacks already existed. They just looked cheap: lurid, over-illustrated, and indistinguishable from one another on a rack. Lane wanted his sixpenny books to signal that they were serious. That meant they had to look nothing like the competition, and the answer turned out to be colour.
Three bands and an office junior
The design that solved it came from a 21-year-old. Edward Young was the office junior at Lane's new company, and he was handed two jobs that would outlast everybody involved. The first was the logo: Lane sent him to London Zoo to sit and draw a penguin from life. The second was the cover.
Young's answer was a horizontal grid — three broad blocks stacked up the jacket. A coloured band at the top, a white or cream band across the middle carrying author and title in Gill Sans, a coloured band at the foot with the logo. No illustration. No shouting. In an era when paperback covers were competing on how much they could cram on, a Penguin won attention by being the only thing on the rack with nothing on it.
It was also, crucially, cheap to print and impossible to get wrong. Any title could be dropped into the grid by anyone, in an afternoon, and it would look like a Penguin. That consistency is what turned a design into a brand.
The colour code in full
The system launched with three colours and grew as the list did. In full, it ran:
- Orange — general fiction. The default, the most common, and the one everybody pictures when they picture a Penguin.
- Green — crime and mystery.
- Dark blue — biography.
- Cerise — travel and adventure. Usually described as pink, to the mild irritation of anyone who works in print.
- Red — drama and plays.
- Purple — essays and belles lettres.
- Yellow — miscellaneous. The shelf for everything that refused to be one of the others.
- Grey — world affairs.
Sitting alongside them was light blue, which was not a Penguin category at all but a separate imprint. Pelican Books launched in May 1937 to do for non-fiction what Penguin had done for novels, opening with George Bernard Shaw's The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism, Capitalism, Sovietism and Fascism — a title that tells you everything about the ambition of the thing. Pelicans kept Young's grid and his typeface, swapped the bird, and took light blue as their own.
Two useful things fall out of that list. One is that the code is a snapshot of what a 1930s publisher thought the categories of reading were: note that crime got its own colour before biography had company, and that "world affairs" needed a band all to itself. The other is that the colour was doing a job we now hand to a search filter.
The Mug
Personalised Literary Classic Books Mug
The grid, the roundel and the cream band — with your own title and name in the middle of it. You pick the band colour from eight, which means you can file yourself correctly: green if you are here for the murders, purple if you are insufferable about essays, yellow if you genuinely cannot be categorised. It does not have to be a book, either. A quote, a film, an in-joke and a name all sit in the same space.
View the mugWhy colour-coding worked so well
The genius of the code was that it worked at distance. A bookshop or a station kiosk in 1938 had no shelf-talkers, no genre signage and no way to search. What it had was a rack of small books, and a customer with about four seconds of attention. Colour gets across a room; a title does not.
It also worked at home. Buy Penguins for a decade and your shelves sort themselves — a block of orange, a run of green, the odd defiant yellow. People arranged their bookcases by band because the books did most of the work for them, and a colour-sorted shelf is still one of the most recognisably English things a room can contain.
And it flattered the reader. A code only works if you know it, so knowing it made you a Penguin person. That is a remarkably efficient piece of brand-building for something that amounts to two rectangles of ink.
Why it quietly disappeared
The code did not so much end as get outgrown. As the list expanded, the categories stopped dividing cleanly — a growing publisher produces far more than eight kinds of book, and "miscellaneous" can only absorb so much before it stops meaning anything.
The bigger pressure was competitive. By the late 1950s, rival paperbacks were selling on illustrated covers, and a design built on having no illustration was starting to look less like restraint and more like an absence. The turning point came in 1961, when Germano Facetti brought in the designer Romek Marber to rework Penguin Crime. Marber's grid kept a family resemblance and kept green for crime, but it lightened the shade and, decisively, made room for an image. Once a picture was allowed in, the band was no longer the thing doing the talking.
What survives is the memory of it, which is why the design is still instantly legible to people who have never owned a sixpenny paperback in their lives. The colours stopped being a filing system and became a look.
What colour would your favourite book be?
Half the fun of knowing the code is applying it to books that were never filed under it. Under the original scheme:
- The Big Sleep and The Body in the Library are green, and not arguable.
- Pride and Prejudice is orange, along with most of what people mean by "a novel".
- Man and Superman is red, because it is a play and the code did not care how you felt about Shaw.
- A Room of One's Own is purple — an essay, and the clearest case for that band there is.
- Traveller from Tokyo is cerise, filed with travel and adventure.
- 1984 is where it gets good. Fiction, so orange — but a strong case exists for grey, and the argument is more interesting than the answer.
That last one is the real appeal of the system. It forces a decision about what a book actually is, and reasonable people disagree. Any code strict enough to be useful is strict enough to start an argument, which is why the ones that last tend to be the ones that were slightly too simple to begin with.
Frequently Asked Questions
What do the colours on Penguin book covers mean?
What does an orange Penguin book mean?
Why are some of these books light blue?
Who designed the original three-band cover?
Is there a personalised book cover mug?
If you would rather have the classics ready-made, there are plenty on the shelf: 1984, The Big Sleep and Go Away, I'm Reading — which is arguably the only honest one of the lot.
BanterBits is not affiliated with, endorsed by or connected to Penguin Books. Penguin, Pelican and Puffin are trademarks of Penguin Books Ltd, referred to here only to discuss the history of their cover design.