House Styles: Gollancz. "Kings in Yellow"

SF fans of a certain age have happy memories of Gollancz's ‘Yellow Jackets’, a plain cover house style consisting of black, red or magenta typeface on a yellow background. This was the brainchild of the firm's founder, Victor Gollancz (1893-1967), who established his own publishing house in 1927 specialising in left-wing writing. He hired Stanley Morison (1889-1967), the typographer who, among many other things, invented the Time Roman font to help him come up with a style of cover design. Gollancz disliked ‘prettified picture jackets’, and spent a day visiting all the railway station bookshops in London to decide which colour would stand-out most effectively against the other books displayed for sale. His choice was informed by a knowledge of European publishing: on the Continent une jaune or un giallo were the popular terms for cheap novels printed in yellow paper—some dyes are more expensive, and some less, but there are a number of cheap ways to print yellow. Together Morison and Gollancz agreed on the typeface and design, selected inks and papers to avoid fading, and created the distinctive yellow-jacket house style.

Before the second world war Gollancz published a wide variety of different kinds of books, science fiction among them, and all sharing the same cover-design logic. This aligned his book covers with the utilitarian aesthetic of posters and fliers, sometimes doing little more than foregrounding the name of the author and the title, as if boldly hailing potential readers as they walked down the street. Sometimes the covers included a denser texture of typographical detail. Here's Medusa (1929) by ‘E H Visiak’ (the pseudonym of Edward Harold Physick, an early writer of what is now called ‘Weird Fiction’)

It's as if the words of this story are so compelling they are spilling out from the inner pages into the world; and by varying the size and styles of the fonts, even down to such little details as shifting from an ‘&’to ‘and’ in the account of the book wedged between title and author, the cover gives the impression of a busy vitality even in its plainness. Every detail contributes to this effect, including the ‘VG’ logo at the top, which it presents to the eye as a tessellation of geometric shapes that only then coalesce into the publisher's initials. It does no harm to the brand that ‘VG’ is the English abbreviation for ‘Very Good!’ (It's a habit among Victor Gollancz authors to refer to the press as ‘Golly’, which has something of the same earnest jollity and positivity).  In similar style here is the dark dystopian speculation of Swastika Night (1937) by ‘Murray Constantine’, a pseudonym for Katharine Burdekin:

The ‘and ...’, followed by its little pointing hand icon, is almost too obviously a tease: a simple but irresistible gimmick for getting us to open the cover and plunge into the book itself. After the war Gollancz concentrated their publishing mostly on science fiction and thrillers, and for several decades their pared-down yellow jacket house-style became almost synonymous with SF.

This 1963 Damon Knight collection of short fiction is winningly literal minded in its design: ‘marvellous inventions’ indeed!  Here, it is the very lack of typographical clutter that works, urging us not to dally on the cover, but to hurry straight into the writing inside.

Delany's 1967 novel is now regarded as a classic of the genre, and Gollancz's ‘a good wine needs no bush’ approach to the cover art does nothing to get in the way of that reputation. When designers experimented with fancier typographical layouts they were endearingly straightforward about it:

The cover of Piers Anthony's 1971 novel of alien dentistry bends its title into arcs and pushes it to the corner, to suggest the comic nature of the work, and perhaps also to mimic teeth. Michael Bishop's 1979 novel of alien anthropology explores the boundaries between the alien and the human, and follows-through on its titular promise of radical change, something at which the bold diagonal of the cover design hints. By the 1980s fashions were changing, and Gollancz paperback covers looked more like the standard, illustrated fare; although they still issued hardbacks with yellow jackets, as with Gibson's cyberpunk-establishing 1984 novel Neuromancer.

So plain a design draws the eye into details of, in this case, the title font that a more cluttered cover would obscure. When Victor Gollancz was bought by Orion Books in 1998 it became exclusively a science fiction and fantasy imprint, and the style of cover art became more varied and colourful for hardbacks and paperbacks both. But the affection with which the old ‘yellow jackets’ were held meant that they were revived in 2011 for the 50 Year Celebrations of publishing SF, with fifty classic SF titles chosen by readers reprinted in the old livery.

And even when not deliberately re-working the Yellow Jacket style, Gollancz reprints and new titles both often subtly refer back to this famous heritage.

As Coldplay so adequately put it: it is all yellow. (Actually, by no means all modern-day Gollancz covers are yellow, but Coldplay never released a song called ‘It Is Occasionally Still Yellow’). The king still reigns.