It is one of those days, when nothing – not even the phone – works, but David Pearson, award-winning Penguin designer, is blessedly kind and obliging. As a junior designer he had the fortune of being selected for an experiment: a series of books to be called Great Ideas which would publish sections of larger works (like St. Augustine’s Confessions) in an inexpensive throwback to the days of pamphleteering. To everyone’s surprise, the Penguin Great Ideas series have been bestsellers, making the works of Marcus Aurelius, Rousseau, Marx, Woolf, and Sartre affordable and undeniably cool.

It was fate: as a child, Pearson occupied himself by playing with and rearranging the contents of his parents’ box of colour-coded Penguin paperbacks. The designer also shares my personal preference for print (the correct and moral preference). Books, he said, are unashamedly beautiful, tactile and tangible.

Pearson studied general graphic design at St. Martin’s College, London, specializing in typography. With his admiration of Penguin ever in mind, he kept an eye on their webpage for job postings, breaking in with the junior design position which led, two years later, to the Great Ideas gig.

Though most designers tend to prefer working with big name living authors, where they can expect high marketing and the establishment of a name or partnership, the Great Ideas was a publishing experiment in the manner of Penguin founder Allen Lane’s original vision of cheap, well-designed books. And, given the project’s experimental nature, there was a greater degree of independence for its designers.

A typical design meeting consists of the heads of each major department of a publishing company, each head laying claim to the finished product’s authorship. The response to the first Great Ideas series’ design was both approving and uneasy. The predominance of white covers (a no-go for advertisers) and lack of Penguin logos prompted Stefan McGrath, Penguin Press’s Managing Director, to admit that though there were faults, if the designers changed one thing, they’d have to change all of it, and he regretted to lose the designs’ visual confidence.

So, in a radical move, all covers were approved in toto. (Remembering this watershed moment makes Pearson a little emotional even now.) Seven or eight years down the line, Penguin’s Great Ideas has gone on to make five series. Pearson sees the first two – red and blue – as delicately considered and safe, becoming more confidant as the series developed into the green, gold, and purple incarnations.

Surprisingly, Pearson informs me, the world of book design is incredibly small. If you’re lucky enough to break in, you’re in. Unlike the popular competitive and cut-throat world of music design, book design is an ‘industry of hobbyists’. But alas, publishing is not the breezy industry it used to be. The book business as a whole is still anxious about the inevitable effect of e-readers on the market.

Pearson’s own prediction is that cheaper paperbacks will continue to fall away, and we should see publishers producing once-off editions to ‘flag up the physical book’. Eventually, he suggests, both mediums – print and digital – will be published side by side. Though Pearson is from the first generation of designers to have always worked on a Mac, ten years later he’s trying to find ways of getting away from it and back to tangible design.

Pearson’s design heroes come (no surprise!) from the Penguin annals: the work of the typographers Jan Tschichold and Hans Schmoller – ‘fastidious, elegant, balanced, timeless’ – and the dynamic designs of the 60s and 70s by Derek Birdsall and David Pelham. When I expressed my admiration for the boxes of postcards Penguin released last year and the wonderful range of design, Pearson said the magic words: ‘it was just a small snippet from the archives…’

I saw this book’s cover before knowing what Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper was about and thought it was quite mundane and just a little bit ugly. After picking it up later and actually bothering to read it, I saw it in a different way.

Once you know the nature of this short story – a collection of journal entries written by a woman confined to her bedroom by her husband, and in a state of nervous depression that leads to psychosis and a paranoid obsession with the wallpaper – the staid print now conjures up her sense of fear and entrapment.

Oppressively intricate and sickly yellow, even the whirlpool swirl in the bottom left threatens to draw one in – just as the narrator comes to believe that she has been imprisoned in the wallpaper by the end of the book.

I now find that this cover draws its strength from both its mundanity and its heavily detailed and insipid ugliness. The first seems to reflect the suffocating boredom prescribed to her as a treatment which only leads her deeper into depression, and the second, with the layering and twists and turns of the pattern, seems to relate to the irrational thought processes which confuse and come to gain control over her mind.

The use of silhouette foregrounds the ideas of racial distinction and identity which Toni Morrison consistently explores: white is separated from black as society demanded both in the novel’s setting of 1850s America and for a considerable period of the author’s life. However, the fact that the silhouette is not entirely monochromatic belies further artistic consideration. The crimson marks on the child’s face refer to the central event within the novel – the mother (Sethe) murdering her own child (Beloved) – and the white discolouration on the mother figure may imply her motivation to commit such a tragic act. The novel is based on the true story of fugitive slave Margaret Garner and explores how the atrocities committed by the white plantation owners of ‘Sweet Home’ convince Sethe to murder her own child rather than be made to suffer herself. This white discolouration of the silhouette thus shows that Sethe is not solely culpable for her act, but that her experiences have driven her to infanticide – just as when she is called an ‘animal’, it is clear that only the animalistic tortures she has endured have made her an instinctive creature. Morrison’s exploration of the guilt Sethe feels for destroying her own ‘best self’ is reflected in this cover art as the novel’s title – the name of the murdered child – springs from and is connected to Sethe’s mind.

The cover becomes a total reversal of the idea of the colour white as indicative of ‘good’ and black of ‘evil’. Whilst Sethe is never able to escape her guilt, here ‘white’ is free of such a sense of moral culpability. The influence of white atrocities appears as an indelible stain on her moral purity and figure.

Between blades of grass we lie watching, waiting on the ground in the middle of a clearing; the smoky mist creeps towards us as we peer over a woman’s legs like an animal inspecting its prey. The woman lies listlessly, her body cropped out of the picture. She is anonymous, identified only by the straps of her red leather shoes, her pale skin and the petrol blue of her silk skirt that has been hitched up over her knees. Thrust against the picture plane, our relationship with this unidentified body is intimate: she is the object of our gaze, and perhaps the victim too. Are we lying with her? Or do we crouch over her? The image is pervaded by a sense of mystery almost like a still from a film noir. With whispers of violence and murder, we immediately get a sense of narrative, underpinned by an eroticism emphasised by the fetishistic focus on her red shoes.

This photograph is taken from the Prada Autumn/Winter 1997 campaign and is the front cover of the newly published Steidldangin catalogue of Glen Luchford’s work. Luchford uses the camera here as a peeping device, almost cinematic in his approach whereby the viewer is dramatically involved in the narrative of his work. Blown up, the image’s murkiness seems to permeate our own space, pulling us into the photograph. The thick white band across the top of the cover, emblazoned with the artist’s name in bold black letters, stamps the image with a tag of reality. This is an image of an image: an enticement not for the viewer but the buyer, calling to be picked up, purchased and placed upon a coffee table. Ultimately its promise of mystery and drama makes it the perfect picture to represent this seminal collection of Luchford’s images, a tantalising tease of what lies behind the cover.

The three cover illustrations of the 2009 Oxford World’s Classics editions of Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis and other stories, The Trial and The Castle are taken from Kafka’s own doodles in his lecture notes. They show, respectively, stick figures sitting in a dejected pose, collapsed at a desk, and standing enclosed on three sides by a sort of fence.

These images reflect a running feature of Kafka’s fiction: his protagonists are trapped within an absurd situation which they are unable either to improve or break out of. It is particularly fitting that in the illustration for The Castle the figure is only trapped on three sides – he can escape, just as K could physically leave the town, but K either chooses to or is passively restricted by its inescapable bureaucratic processes.

However, the sense of despair in these images is a little misleading. This is caused not only by the poses of the figures themselves, but also the covers’ brightly coloured backgrounds, which almost overwhelm the simple black lines of Kafka’s doodles. Perhaps Gregor of Metamorphosis is less active, but both K and Joseph K. of The Trial spend the entire novel resisting the sort of existential hopelessness that the reader experiences on their behalf. We continuously expect the strange events and unfamiliar surroundings of these two novels to overcome the characters, and in the case of The Trial this does eventually happen, but their constant striving for meaning and purpose goes directly against the emotions expressed by these defeated stick figures.

The choice of these doodles illustrating the works is laudable. They give an insight into Kafka’s mentality of fear and hopelessness – perhaps emotions provoked by lectures? Fancy that! – which, although often counteracted by the characters in his fiction, nevertheless permeates all his writing.