Question:  Calippo ice lollies. The Dutch national football team. Penguin classics. What do they all have in common?

If you answered, ‘the colour orange’, then congratulations – your perceptive faculties are firing on all cylinders.

It takes a fair amount of guts to build a brand around the colour orange. Commonly associated with US prison uniforms, the colour can be considered a criminal choice for graphic designers. Done badly, it can look garish and unsightly. But done well, it can be truly iconic.

Comfortably ensconced in the publishing hall of fame, Sir Allen Lane was something of a publishing revolutionary. Recognising the lack of a good, cheap read while idling at a train station, he founded Penguin Books alongside brothers Richard and John. His ambition? Making classic works accessible to all.

Priced at just 6 pence (just over 4 pounds in today’s money), the original Penguin paperbacks proved a huge hit with the mass market. Suddenly, some of the best authors throughout history could be read with little more than pocket money. Its popular appeal proved something of a phenomenon. The world of publishing had truly turned over a new leaf.

With such an original concept, Penguin books needed an original look…

Which is where we get to the colour orange. Designer and later war hero Edward Young was just 21 years old when he was invited to join Penguin. Along with creating the company’s famous logo, he pioneered the use of highly recognisable colours to indicate the book’s genre. Orange for novels, green for crime and detective novels, and pale blue for the Pelican series. At a glance, one could identify another’s reading predilections.

Finding beauty in simplicity, a later succession of designers and typographers sought to establish a consistent, understated look for the company. Influenced by the pre-war Bauhaus artistic movement, Swiss designer Jan Tschichold used geometric principles to ensure the book covers married style with function. Doing away with fancy embellishments and extraneous colour, the company became synonymous with clarity, minimalism, and simplicity.

Today, Penguin Books is continuing the legacy of its founders. No handbag or jacket pocket is complete without a well-worn Penguin classics edition. And whether you’re reading Dickens, Orwell, or even Morrissey, that unmistakable colour system never fails to convey a sense of warmth and familiarity.

In the same way, no bookcase is fully stocked without at least one or more orange spines. In fact, for a true bibliophile, seeing a whole row of charmingly colour coded editions is one of the most satisfying things you can possibly see.

If you have an empty shelf you’d like to fill, make sure you check out our range of penguin books, available per metre. You will even have the option to approve the books before dispatch, otherwise a beautifully random selection will be made on your behalf.

Check out our range here: https://curatedbooks.co.uk/product/product-4/

or alternatively penguin themselves for their latest books on offer https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/