shewhomust | Dancing penguin, articulated dragon

We had a dinner date in Newcastle last night - a lovely evening, with good winter food (parsnip soup! and mutton chops! and a fresh lemony cheesecake to follow!) and excellent company - and we used it as an opportunity to take an afternoon out and visit the Shipley Art Gallery.

Specifically, I wanted to see the Penguin exhibition - the books, not the birds. We enjoyed it very much (so much, says Gail, who accompanied us, that the attendants looked in occasionally, to see what we were up to). As I had expected, it was not a large exhibition, so much of the appeal was not seeing things that we hadn't seen before, but identifying things we had (and indeed owned: oh, I have that edition of that book...) - put me in a room full of books and I'm happy. The presentation was less great, and I think suffered from not being quite sure where its target audience was, one minute holding back from overdoing the detail, the next using terms like 'mass-market paperback' without offering a definition. So the design for the original Penguin Classics was described as using 'a medallion-like image called a roundel': if you can't deduce that the word 'roundel' refers to that round thing, I don't suppose comparing it to a medallion is going to help you. A display of ten different editions of The Great Gatsby was dated 'between 1950 and 2000' - yes, but in what order? A wall panel of Penguin logos claimed that of the different versions used over the years, one appeared to be dancing, while another appeared to have appendicitis - of those shown, only one could have been either of those, and we spent some time discussing which. And so on. More successful were the three large panels of books arranged in rows to create a block of solid colour - orange for general fiction, green for crime, blue for bon-fiction. Alongside these, the jumble of colours and styles of the seventy editions published to mark Penguin's seventieth anniversary did not show up well. I was interested to see that although crime was distinguished by its green livery, science fiction had sneaked in among the orange covers, even when identified as a separate line, Penguin Science Fiction. Also that Josephine Tey's The Franchise Affair appeared in both sets, in the same design but with a wash of either green or orange overlaid on the line drawing of the illustration: simultaneous publication or a change of heart? And, if the latter, which way?

There were Puffin books, too - while the exhibition itself is not particularly aimed at children, the associated activities clearly are - but this display was less interesting, though they did have a rather tattered copy of the red Worzel Gummidge (the first Puffin book, in the original, colour-coded. edition, and very collectable). Much of the display was devoted to the re-launched Puffin Club, which I will not be joining.

We moved on to the Shipley's permanent collection, which is primarily of art and design, and includes a wonderful mixture of historic domestic articles and craft items, including some weird and wonderful contemporary crafts. We were very much taken by a small - about a foot long - wingless metal dragon, described as follows:

Dragon
Iron, Japan, late 1800s
Japanese armourers used their skills to produce figures, toys and novelties for sale to European traders. This object is articulated, every part of it moves like a real dragon!