On the Grid: Penguin Classics Enters the Gaming Age

As I stare at the spines of what must be a thousand paperback books, most published before I was born, many stir the imagination with ambitious titles like The Uses of Literacy, Minds and Machines and Sybil or The Two Nations. But only a handful, with their rich oranges and teals, captivate at first glance. These are the Penguin paperbacks.

I'm in Portland, Oregon at the self-claimed largest bookstore in the world. Here, used and out-of-print titles vie for a second act, sharing shelf space with new books. A store as comprehensive as this is also a kind of accidental museum. And it's one of the few shops a browser can go to understand viscerally the impact Penguin had, with its literary populism and smart design, on the publishing industry in the 20th Century.

These hallmarks of the Penguin brand reign again in We Tell Stories, the publisher's latest project. It consists of a promotional website posting six new short stories, one weekly for six weeks. Each story is written by a genre author especially for the site and is inspired by a Penguin classic. The first week, bestselling thriller author Charles Cumming contributed "The 21 Steps," alluding to John Buchan's The Thirty-Nine Steps.

With each week's offering, We Tell Stories promises to experiment with new forms of narrative, telling a story with the use of Web resources. The plot of Cumming's "The 21 Steps," for example, can be followed by using Google Maps.

Online gaming startup Six to Start, founded by ex-Mind Candy developers Dan and Adrien Hon, designed the site. Though this isn't the first time Penguin has reached outside the company to gain a fresh take on its design, it's the first time designers have participated in the development of published content. Six to Start hope We Tell Stories will be a hospitable introduction for users to alternate reality gaming, or ARGs, as the genre is known by members of its community — essentially, a form of collaborative online play-acting extending into real-world devices and situations.

"We wanted most of the six stories to be personal experiences." Adrien Hon told Gamasutra. "That's partly because that's what people are generally comfortable with when it comes to written fiction, and partly because we wanted these stories to be an easy entry into online storytelling."

This is the second project the Hons have taken with the hope of popularizing ARGs. By any measure, Perplex City, the first project presented by Mind Candy in 2005, was extremely successful. Besides exploding into a London media event by the time its first season wrapped in early 2007, Perplex City is notable for hatching the business model which has since become standard for ARGs. This self-sustaining model is built around merchandising, and while Perplex City sold trading cards to attract revenue, other ARGs have since built their businesses around young adult novels and clothing, among other lifestyle accessories.

By using We Tell Stories as a promotional tool, tying it closely to the publisher's Classics line, Penguin sticks to ARG's tried and true past. The novelty in Penguin's market isn't pitched as squarely to the tech culture which past ARG marketing blitzes — like the ones carried out for Steven Spielberg's A.I. and Microsoft's Xbox — sought to reach, and its more literary flavor and heritage suit Penguin's brand.

As is typical for ARGs, a sense of overarching mystery is key to We Tell Stories. This is most vividly illustrated by the press release's promise of "a secret seventh story" hidden on the Web "involving a vaguely familiar girl who has a habit of getting herself lost."

For all the whimsy, there's also some calculation. The first decade of the 21st Century has been rocky for Penguin with distribution problems and the close of its in-house design department. Then, earlier this year, it was revealed that an autobiography by Margaret Seltzer published on Penguin's Riverhead imprint was a hoax. We Tell Stories is an attempt to regain the vision which came to the company's founder, Allen Lane, one afternoon in 1935 while idling at a train station: that quality literature be made accessible to anyone willing to explore it. In the 1930s, this meant a book design cheap enough to warrant a first run in the then spectacular range of thirty thousand copies. As newer paperback publishers such as Anchor, Ace and Vintage began to crowd the field in the '40s, Lane decided he'd create competitive distance through a superior though still cost-efficient design.

For a business in 2008, reaching out through design means cultivating an online community, which is precisely the objective behind We Tell Stories. But Penguin already has more of an online community than it might realize. At Things Magazine there is an online collection of vintage covers from Pelican Books, Penguin's nonfiction imprint. Flickr houses several similar collections of Penguin covers, all posted by individual enthusiasts. One of the most impressive collections is exhibited at AceJet170, a blog maintained by graphic designer Richard Weston.

From the bookstore, for approximately the price I would have payed for the same Penguin when it was first published, I take home a copy of Benjamin Disraeli's roman à thèse, Sybil. Someday, on a faraway beach, I might get around to reading this tale of England's Victorian working class, written with the urgency of advocacy journalism by a future Prime Minister. Then again, probably not. But tonight I do manage to admire the book's design. The edition I picked up was published during Swiss typographer Jan Tschichold's legendary two-year stint as Penguin's house designer.

Tschichold created the first Penguin typographical grid in the late 1940s. The combination of his clean modernist layout with the classical symmetry one might expect from a turn-of-the-century letterpress enlarged the aura of the Penguin brand, stretching it beyond commerce and into the realm of other mid-century graphic design classics, like Paul Rand's logos for IBM and ABC or Joseph Muller-Brockmann's striking Swiss public service posters. His campaign raised the standard for paperback design to a level rarely reached before or since, with so many publishers habitually saving money through small margins and tiny, crowded text which mocks the reader. Tschichold's clear and legible typography upheld Lane's inclusive vision of literature.

In the half-century-plus since Tschichold, the Penguin design ethic has ebbed and flowed like any which must contend with the relentless pull of time and money. But with We Tell Stories, the now-faded novelty of Allen Lane's populist vision has, like my copy of Sybil, been dusted off for one more skim.