“Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void but out of chaos.” ― Mary Shelley

"It is the autumn of 1850 and a westerly wind is blowing through London, setting the scene for Lynn Shepherd's new literary whodunit. Shepherd has previously published elegant mysteries inspired by Bleak House and Mansfield Park, but A Treacherous Likeness takes her into more ethically dangerous territory: she founds her novel on a series of real-life tragedies. Her focus here is on the story of Percy and Mary Shelley and Mary's step-sister Claire Clairmont, and on the battle the Shelleys' descendants fought to preserve their reputations. […]

     A Treacherous Likeness opens with Jane Shelley summoning detective Charles Maddox to the house on Chester Street from where she controls access to Shelley's archive with an iron grasp. Charles's brief is to establish what papers Claire Clairmont has in her possession and to help the Shelleys retrieve them. Being a bright young man, Charles deduces that Jane and her hen-pecked husband Sir Percy in fact want more from him than this. Over the course of much sleuthing he discovers that his own great-uncle became entangled with the Shelleys in 1814, and that in the papers of his family lies a secret which threatens to destroy the legacy of the poet and his wife."
—Daisy Hay, The Guardian
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"[…] make the thing look worse."

"[…David Pearson, on-time, Penguin in-house designer] was [...] responsible for the 2007 redesign of the Penguin Popular Classics series, the cheapo, no-introduction, no-scholarly notes edition originally brought out to counter the threat of Wordsworth Classics. The previous look had been full bleed artwork with a tan-coloured oval title box towards the top. They were, to be charitable, twee in the extreme. To be uncharitable, they were horrid.

     Penguin ran an internal competition to come up with a comprehensive overhaul of the series. Five designers submitted, and Pearson won with a super-plain, type-only design featuring modern Gill Sans lettering, a doubled up logo featuring two dancing penguins (to denote, perhaps rather obliquely, the ‘popular’ aspect) and the £2 price tag, prominently, even proudly, displayed. The cover was an equally restrained maroon."
— Jonathan Gibbs, The Independent
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From: Penny Dreadful Vintage

An early Penguin cover design. Note the price: "One shilling and sixpence," which by today's reckoning (since Decimal Day in 1971) would be 7 1/2p. 

"plenty of musty stuff..."

From: The History Blog

“[...] 'In the deeply unemployed winter of last year,' said Sammy Jay, the twenty-three-year-old grandson of Douglas Jay, 'my step-grandmother Mary had kindly given me an occupation in sorting through my late grandfather’s political papers for Oxford’s Bodleian Library archives.' With an interest in Romantic literature, Douglas Jay had collected, as Sammy said, 'plenty of musty stuff from the nineteenth century.' Wordsworth, Tennyson, and Dickens lined the shelves of Douglas Jay’s library, as well as works by his contemporaries. There were some nice copies of books presented to him by poets like Louis MacNeice, Stephen Spender, and Cecil Day-Lewis. 'Nothing at all,' Jay continued, 'could have prepared me for the little volume lying at an angle in the corner of the top shelf.' He almost passed it over but instead grabbed it and flipped it open. Inside was an inscription – 'To Lord Byron, from the author.'

     'It took me awhile to adjust to the magnitude of the find,' said Jay.
     Sammy Jay is a bibliophile in his own right who collects Romantic association copies and ephemera and is now employed at Peter Harrington Rare Books in London. So he knew what to do: he took the book to Richard Ovenden, deputy librarian at the Bodleian Libraries, to authenticate Mary Shelley’s signature. Ovenden was positive."
— Jonathan Shipley, Fine Books & Collections
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