Respect / The pelican brief
If you browse through the teetering Ikea shelving at any garage sale worth its weight, tucked among the self-help books and footballer biographies, you may be lucky enough to find a pelican soft-cover, identified by its distinctive blue spine and consistently brilliant cover design. Though less celebrated than its famous orange friend the penguin, it shares a comparable design pedigree.
The first pelicans appeared in 1937 and were developed to present ‘serious’ subjects including science, sociology and economics to the general public. Just as penguin covers reached their pinnacle throughout the 1960s and 1970s, distinguished designers including Bruno Munari, Fletcher/Forbes/Gill and Derek Birdsall contributed to a stunning suite of pelican titles under the astute direction of Germano Facetti and later, David Pelham. Based on Romek Marber's 1962 grid, the covers initially used Intertype Standard, a version of Akzidenz Grotesk which Pelham eventually replaced with Helvetica. Simple, abstract graphics, a restrained colour palette and innovative printing techniques like overprinting were the main elements in a brilliantly realised family of titles.
A few years back I began collecting pelicans (see a selection below), and though discontinued some three decades ago, they remain an easy find in garage sales and second hand bookstores. If you can cope with the occasional sideways glance that the subject matter provokes (Sex in Society anyone?), the pelican is one book you can judge by its cover.
(DH)
