May of the Penguins

A bank holiday weekend of museums, this time. First of all, the opening day of the Great North Museum on Saturday. We had to go for two reasons: firstly, they're been working on it around the corner from my office ever since, well, ever since it was my office; and secondly, the winsome young girl on the posters all over the Metro threatens to scream and scream until she's sick if you don't. A more considered write up will have to wait until the place isn't so incredibly busy; walking into Newcastle at lunchtime, it was encouraging to see that the queue reached all the way out of the museum grounds and round into the university (the one place you're usually guaranteed to see a queue reaching out of a door in town is the Kentucky Fried Chicken on Northumberland Street; I'm not being facetious, it's actually true). The exhibitions on Hadrian's Wall and ancient Egypt aside (well, not aside, they're very good), the main focus is on natural history and taxidermy in particular; owls seem to be the favourite, which is fine by me (to anyone reading in Norman, Oklahoma - pop into The Library pub and say hello to the stuffed owl who lives there). Admittedly, the prevalence of stuffed animals makes the occasional appearance of a living reptile in a box somewhat surprising, as if they weren't sure whether to go for the full reptile house display or not, but it's all very well laid out. There's also a replica dinosaur skeleton and a planetarium, which we had no hope of getting into on Saturday, but which we'll be going back for. I haven't been in a planetarium since Jodrell Bank c. 1990, me.

Then on Sunday, to Gateshead for the "70 Years of Penguin Design" exhibition at the Shipley Gallery. Firstly, though, a comment on the interior of Gateshead Metro Station before someone decides to rip the whole thing out, because they really shouldn't. Yes, it's dated, but there's a period charm to it, rather like the Piccadilly Line at Heathrow Terminals 1,2,3, of which Gateshead is weirdly reminiscent. If you ever have a dream in which you're at the Heathrow tube station and it looks familiar yet unfamiliar, as if all the elements have been somehow shaken up into some kind of architectural anagram, then you're probably at Gateshead Metro. In fact, it's intriguing how the different parts of the Metro are shaping up as various tribute acts for sections of the London Underground. Gateshead is the Piccadilly line, with hints of the Victoria; the all new Haymarket is clearly going for the Jubilee look, albeit without the platform doors (which I never liked anyway - I like a bit of edge on my tube); Jesmond is the Circle/District, whereas West Jesmond is clearly some prosperous Metropolitan line suburb. Monument (Newcastle), ironically, bears little resemblance to Monument (London).

Well, it's intriguing to me.

Anyway, the Penguin exhibit. The title of "70 Years of Penguin Design" was somewhat baffling at first, until I realised that this exhibition has been touring for the last four years and should therefore be called "70+4 Years of Penguin Design," catchy as that isn't. Some very nice material on the development of the logo (from its dancing days to a more sedate, regal stature) and striking mounted displays of orange, blue and green Penguins (this last turning into some kind of private Panini sticker transaction for me: "Got... got... need... got... need"). A particularly nice exhibit showed the various incarnations of The Great Gatsby over the years, and made the curious point, seemingly obvious but which had never occured to me before, that whereas music (at least, popular music) is pretty much inextricably linked to a certain cover image for the rest of its cultural life, the marketing identity of the written word is much more changeable, and even where book covers become iconic (the Penguin Lady Chatterley's Lover, for instance), there's a sense that eventually a new cover has to be designed precisely in order to overthrow such visual dominance. More theoretical discussion of why this might be the case was passed over, but I'm sure I'll come back to this in the near future.

Comprehensive as the exhibition was in some areas (gratifyingly, green Penguins and the development of the Marber grid), there were some curious omissions. There was a big display of the Penguin 70 range to celebrate the 70th anniversary, but barely a mention of the Penguin 60s from 1995, which were surely much more influential in popularising the pamphlet style publishing which Penguin have capitalised on so much in recent years. Most strikingly, the Classics range wasn't even acknowledged as existing beyond the 1960s; lots of material on the roundel design of the original version from the 1950s, including the strangely humorous error on the cover of E.V. Rieu's translation of The Odyssey, which shows a boat with both oars and full sails, but not a single black spine of a later publication in sight. Since the recent redesign of the classics range in the last five or so years has been the most striking innovation to folks like me - and, let's be honest, to most of the people who go to this exhibition - this seems a little odd, not least because it's in changes like this that Penguin lead the market (or did you think Oxford's rebranding of the World's Classics series shortly afterwards was coincidence?). However, there was a nice display of some splendidly 1970s covers for J.G. Ballard, all looking like stills from a Terry Gilliam animation (and one including the image of Mickey Mouse on a television screen - I imagine that was a copyright nightmare) and an interesting survey of how far the orange/green bars look of the original paperbacks has infiltrated publishing and popular culture more widely. Oh, and we got lovely free bookmarks as well. If you're at all interested in publishing or just want to see some occasionally freaky covers from the 1970s (especially on the Pelicans), go and see it if it pops up near you. Go on, pick up a - no, I'm not going to do that.