Penguin Classics — the black-band years
From the mid-1980s into the early 2000s, Penguin Classics wore a cream frame, a black panel for author and title, and a period picture chosen for each book. The back cover named the picture, often down to the gallery that lent it: Caspar David Friedrich's Moonrise on the Seashore for The Moonstone, Caillebotte for The Ambassadors, a Greek vase for Pindar. Where a scan of the same printing on the Internet Archive names the picture, the credit is shown as printed; the rest are left blank rather than guessed.
Idylls of the King
Alfred Lord Tennyson
Cover: The Death of Arthur by James Archer
Selected Poems
Pierre de Ronsard
Cover: Allégorie de l'Amour (ou de l’eau), French school
Poems
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Selected writings
Samuel Johnson
Cover: Dr Johnson at tea, from an illustration by Thomas Rowlandson
Adam Bede
George Eliot
Sybil
Benjamin Disraeli
Pamela
Samuel Richardson
Ivanhoe
Sir Walter Scott
Cover: Robin Hood and his Merry Men by Daniel Maclise
Jonathan Wild
Henry Fielding
Cover: The Arrest by William Hogarth
Goldsmith's The vicar of Wakefield
Oliver Goldsmith
The Private Memoirs and Confessions of A Justified Sinner
James Hogg
Reflections on the revolution in France
Edmund Burke
Cover: The Tree of Freedom, 1789 (Musée Carnavalet)
On Liberty
John Stuart Mill
Framley Parsonage
Anthony Trollope
Essays
Francis Bacon
Cover: Portrait of Francis Bacon by John Vanderbank
Beggar's opera
John Gay
The Portrait of a Lady
Henry James
The Aspern Papers / The Turn of the Screw
Henry James
The Bostonians
Henry James
Cover: Sita and Sarita by Cecilia Beaux
Amelia
Henry Fielding
William Congreve
William Congreve
Cover: A scene from Love for Love by Robert Smirke
The Ambassadors
Henry James
Cover: Homme nu-tête vu de dos à la fenêtre by Gustave Caillebotte
The Golden Bowl
Henry James
Cover: Conversation Piece by Solomon J. Solomon
Marius the Epicurean
Walter Pater
Cover: Caligula’s Palace by J.M.W. Turner
Selected prose
John Donne
Cover: Statue of John Donne in his shroud (St Paul’s Cathedral)
The Rivals / The School for Scandal / The Critic
Richard Brinsley Sheridan
Cover: David Garrick and Mrs Garrick Playing Picquet by Johann Zoffany
Divine right and democracy : an anthology of political writing in Stuart England
David Wootton
Cover: Woodcut from Colonel Sidney’s Overthrow
The Adventures of Caleb Williams
William Godwin
Cover: The Light of Justice, a drawing by Goya
The Wings of the Dove
Henry James
Cover: Berthe Morisot by Edouard Manet
A Pair of Blue Eyes
Thomas Hardy
Cover: A Close Watch by E.W. Brewthal
Utilitarianism and other essays
John Stuart Mill
Cover: An English Autumn Afternoon by Ford Madox Brown
The Trumpet-Major, and Robert His Brother
Thomas Hardy
Cover: The Moorland by J.W. Inchbold
Moll Flanders
Daniel Defoe
Cover: Portrait of Moll, attributed to William Hogarth
Introductory lectures on aesthetics
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Cover: The Interior of the Pantheon by Giovanni Paolo Pannini
Oroonoko, The rover, and other works
Aphra Behn
Cover: Portrait of Aphra Behn (St Hilda’s College)
Die Geburt der Tragödie
Friedrich Nietzsche
Cover: Bacchus among the Muses
The description of a new world
Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle
Augustan critical writing
David Womersley
Cover: Book Auction at Blackwell’s, 1747, by William Green
The History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews
Henry Fielding
The tragic muse
Henry James
Cover: La Tragédie by Jean-Léon Gérôme
No name
Wilkie Collins
Cover: Miss Dene by Lord Frederic Leighton
Jane Eyre
Charlotte Brontë
Kidnapped
Robert Louis Stevenson
Cover: Figures in a River Landscape by Alexander Nasmyth
The Moonstone
Wilkie Collins
Cover: Moonrise on the Seashore by Caspar David Friedrich
Wuthering Heights
Emily Brontë
Sense and Sensibility
Jane Austen
Cover: Chawton House and Church, 1809, by an anonymous artist
Daniel Deronda
George Eliot
Cover: The Casino, Monte Carlo by Christian Bokelman
The master of Ballantrae
Robert Louis Stevenson
Writings from Japan
Lafcadio Hearn
Cover: Kinryuzan Asakusa by Hiroshige III
Mary Barton
Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
A simple story
Cover: Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire as Diana by Maria Cosway
The Newcomes
William Makepeace Thackeray
Essay concerning human understanding
John Locke
The life of Olaudah Equiano
Olaudah Equiano
Typee
Herman Melville
The Mayor of Casterbridge
Thomas Hardy
The Return of the Native
Thomas Hardy
Far from the Madding Crowd
Thomas Hardy
Cover: A Lonely Valley, c. 1890, by the Walmsley Brothers
Under the Greenwood Tree or, The Mellstock quire
Thomas Hardy
Cover: The Whisper of the Muse (G. F. Watts), April 1865, by Julia Margaret Cameron
Weir of Hermiston
Robert Louis Stevenson
Cover: Lord Braxfield, Lord Justice Clerk, 1788–99
Lady Audley's secret
Mary Elizabeth Braddon
Metamorphoses
Lucius Apuleius
The Law and the Lady
Wilkie Collins
The Pickwick Papers
Charles Dickens
The Antiquary
Sir Walter Scott
The Bride of Lammermoor
Sir Walter Scott
The Prince and the Pauper
Mark Twain
Poems by John Keats
John Keats
The adventures of David Simple
Sarah Fielding
Cover: A View of Covent Garden with Figures by Joseph Van Aken
A Texas cowboy
Charles A. Siringo
Cover: The Cow Puncher by Frederic Remington
The Last Chronicle of Barset
Anthony Trollope
Vanity Fair
William Makepeace Thackeray
The Italian
Ann Radcliffe
Cover: Atala au tombeau by Anne-Louis Girodet de Roussy-Trioson
The Prisoner of Zenda
Anthony Hope
She
H. Rider Haggard
Cover: Die Sünde (Sin) by Franz von Stuck
A sentimental journey through France and Italy, by Mr. Yorick
Laurence Sterne
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
Harriet A. Jacobs
Dred
Harriet Beecher Stowe
The strange case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and other tales of terror
Robert Louis Stevenson
The Travels of Marco Polo
Marco Polo
Historiae
P. Cornelius Tacitus
The Secret History
Procopius
Discourse on Method And The Meditations
René Descartes
The Odes
Pindar
Cover: Two athletes, detail from a Greek vase, about 430 B.C.
I promessi sposi
Alessandro Manzoni
Lunyu
Confucius
Cover: Fu Sheng making copies of Confucius' works (painting, attributed)
L'Heptaméron
Marguerite Queen, consort of Henry II, King of Navarre
Cover: Scène galante dans un jardin, from a manuscript
The erotic poems
Ovid
Cover: Fresco from Pompeii depicting Mars and Venus
Fables
Jean de La Fontaine
Lettres philosophiques
Voltaire
Rome and Italy
Titus Livius
Cover: Silver denarius of Sextus Pompeius
Πολιτικά
Aristotle
City of God
Augustine of Hippo
Cover: World Chronicle by Ekkehard von Aura
Discourses on Livy
Niccolò Machiavelli
The Conquest of Gaul
Gaius Julius Caesar
Cover: Coin of the Arverni showing the head of Vercingetorix
Papers and Journals
Søren Kierkegaard
Cover: Interior with the Artist’s Brother
On government
Cicero
Cover: Catiline Denounced by Cicero by Cesare Maccari
Praise of folly ; and, Letter to Maarten Van Dorp, 1515
Desiderius Erasmus
Cover: Portrait of Erasmus by Quentin Metsys
Create your own collection — from any cover, or from a photo of your shelf
The paintings are named as the books credit them on the back cover, for the printing shown, read from scans at the Internet Archive or from collectors quoting their own copies. Where a tile names nothing, no such credit was found — the picture is not therefore anonymous.