Dolphin is the name of a paperback imprint launched by Doubleday & Company in the 1950s and 1960s, known for reissues of literary classics. The visual identity of Dolphin Books is closely tied to the work of Italian-born designer George Giusti, who created cover designs for the imprint and whose archive contains logo drawings and paste-ups for both Anchor and Dolphin Books.
Design and History
George Giusti (1908-1991) was trained at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera in Milan and later opened his own studio in Zurich before emigrating to the United States in 1938 [1]. His client files at the Cary Graphic Arts Collection at RIT include materials for Anchor and Dolphin Books, specifically logo drawings, paste-ups and prints [2]. The same archive holds book covers, jackets, transparencies and proofs for Anchor and Dolphin Books spanning 1953 to 1973 [3].
For the Dolphin imprint, Giusti is documented as the cover designer, while illustrators such as Robin Jacques, John Alcorn and Sydney Butchkes provided cover drawings [4][5]. Dolphin Books editions from the early 1960s credit Giusti on their back covers, for example the 1961 edition of The War of the Worlds and The Time Machine [6].
The Dolphin imprint operated alongside Doubleday’s Anchor Books, and both imprints shared the parent company’s dolphin-and-anchor colophon. The motif itself derives from the printer’s device of Aldus Manutius, the Venetian Renaissance publisher, whose emblem of a dolphin entwined around an anchor was later adopted by Nelson Doubleday in the twentieth century [7]. Anchor Books was named for the anchor that, along with a dolphin, forms Doubleday’s logo [8].
Meaning and Symbolism
The dolphin-and-anchor device carries a documented classical meaning. The dolphin symbolised swiftness while the anchor represented steadiness, a pairing that expressed the Latin motto Festina lente, or “hasten slowly” [9]. This Renaissance emblem was used by Aldus Manutius as his firm’s device and remains one of the best-known publishers’ marks [7].
Typography and Design
Giusti’s work for Dolphin Books is described in the Robin Jacques Papers as cover design, with Jacques serving as cover illustrator for the Dolphin imprint [4]. The division of credit appears consistently on Dolphin editions from the period, with “cover design by George Giusti” printed alongside the illustrator’s credit [6][10]. Specific typography choices for the Dolphin logo itself are not documented in available sources.
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