Slowly getting back on track:
I like this as much for social-historical as aesthetic reasons. This is one of 30 classical scores that Penguin brought out between 1949 and 1956 (as ever, dates &c. taken from Phil Baines), edited by the composer Gordon Jacob - Mozart, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Weber, Wagner... From here the enterprise looks quixotic; but it reflects a point in British history when there was a widespread faith in the importance of high culture, and a belief that all that was needed was to put it within reach of the ordinary man and woman. The Penguin Scores were born of the same impulse that in 1946 created Penguin Classics, the Arts Council and the BBC Third Programme; and echoes of it can be detected later in TV series such as Civilisation and Jacob Bronowski's The Ascent of Man. More prosaically, Baines's note that the series was dropped when it ceased to make money implies that it was profitable before then - and after all, the music was all out of copyright and production costs can't have been huge.
The series was designed by Jan Tschichold, who ran Penguin's typography and production from 1947-49, and who was a celebrated typographer in his own right: gorgeous endpaper-style patterns, titles set in Garamond. As I mentioned a few weeks back, the Scores are forerunners of the poetry designs of the late Fifties and Sixties. Most of the books are in this landscape format, though I have a couple of later ones in a more traditional portrait shape.
I'm starting to get the hang of scanning these things in, and the colours here are for once a pretty faithful reproduction of the original.
Presumably because few people cultivate the score-reading habit, they rarely cost much - a fiver should get you a very well-preserved copy. This one was £2.
A beauty, and, as you point out, a nice piece of social history as well as a thing lovely to behold.
Posted by: John Self | May 27, 2009 at 01:26 PM
John - an honour to have you commenting. I've been meaning to add your blog to my list. For those who don't know: http://theasylum.wordpress.com/
Posted by: Robert Hanks | May 27, 2009 at 03:12 PM