"The whole concept is rather vulgar," admits Penguin U.K. art director John Hamilton. "It's just an attempt to make money." In the past, designers who wanted to refashion Modernist monuments were usually selling historicizing cloaks--just think of the way Michael Graves' proposed Whitney "addition" overpowered poor Marcel Breuer's cube. But Hamil-ton has overthrown Modern great Jan Tschichold's iconic orange classic Penguin covers with hardly a nod to Gutenberg, or even William Morris. Since 1998, he's used a motley assortment of outside designers--both big-name and emerging--and in-house talent to perk up 60 of Penguin's warhorse titles, quadrupling the sales of twentieth-century greats like Fitzgerald, Forster, and Camus and bringing literature in close proximity to Backstreet Boy biographies. "The Virgin store took a whole set of them," he says proudly.

It's no accident that the books looked right at home on Virgin's shelves. Hamilton recruited his team by cold-calling the designers of his favorite CD covers and magazines, including people at Tomato and Raygun. Eighty percent of his calls bore fruit, primarily, he says, because it's hard to turn down a chance to spin In Cold Blood or A Clockwork Orange for a new generation. Anarchic tendencies ran the gamut from chopped-up titles (on William S. Burroughs' Junky, the "y" seems to have fallen down) to double vision (Compton MacKenzies' Whisky Galore features, appropriately, a pint with all four colors out of register).

Adrian Shaughnessy, creative director of Intro, a design firm whose typical clients are cult labels and hip recording artists like Talvin Singh and Roni Size, was one of the first outside designers to sign on. Intro did the covers for George Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London, Hunter S. Thompson's Hell's Angels, and Robert Graves' Goodbye to All That.

Hamilton gave the firm carte blanche. "He asked us to try to capture the essence of the book," Shaughnessy says. "I hate the sort of jackets that cram every reference point onto the cover. Publishers should be designing better covers rather than turning them into point-of-sale items, which is what most book jackets look like."

Intro's cover for Graves is, in fact, radically understated, made out of burnt-out black-and-white war photos and several shades of gray. Thompson gets a brash typographic treatment, chopped-up capitals bursting out of what looks like the remains of a Lucky Strike package. It's a mood, not a narrative, because Shaughnessy thinks publishers shouldn't sell the youth market short. "This is not a calculating eLet's grab the kids' approach," he says. "Media-literate young people don't need groovy covers; they need honesty of expression."

Allusiveness produced crystallizations (sometimes literally) of the books' themes. In-house designer Robert Kester printed up Kurt Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle to look like the cover of a science manual, then froze the film under a thin layer of ice. For Junky, Hamilton rejected needle tracks or syringes, insisting that former Raygun designers Amanda Sissons and Chris Ashworth use a dental X ray of poppies instead. And A Passage to India, for once, features neither proper ladies and gents, nor dusty landscapes: Penguin's in-house design team picked a lush textile motif, red Raj elephants floating on a green field.

Pentagram's Angus Hyland also took an honest approach for his update of Capote's In Cold Blood. He used the only known photograph of the Clutters (the murdered family) as his base. "I just filtered the picture to give it a sense of unease and impending violence, which is juxtaposed against the macabre innocence of a child's toy," he says. The blown-up typography was chosen for its lurid, Fifties dime-novel look.

Now that sales have taken off, the whole concept seems like a no-brainer. But when Penguin's sales director brought Hamilton a list of five titles to face-lift, it was a shot in the dark. The first to receive a makeover was Jack Kerouac's On the Road, closely followed by Lady Chatterley's Lover, Animal Farm, and Breakfast at Tiffany's. On the Road, done in-house and featuring a photograph taken from the point of view of a car tire, gets its modern kick from two tones of purple, no-nonsense typography, and a front that wraps around the spine, turning the book into a three-dimensional object. Designer Darren Haggar used this technique to even greater effect on Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four: A blue TV image of a man's face wraps horizontally from front to back. Wherever the book is in a room, it seems to be watching you.

"I had lots and lots of arguments about keeping the orange spine," Hamilton says. "The orange spine and the penguin were fantastic original things, but lines and lines of orange spines on the shelf do not entice readers. I don't think they know or care."

Hamilton's new classics throw old-fashioned ideas about brand consistency out the window in favor of the new, diversified language of CD covers, sneaker ads, and movie titles. All of entertainment, he says, is the real competition for reading, not just other books.

There are still holdouts. Hamilton has done 50 new covers, but he's also commissioned at least 10 more that will never see the light of day: David Carson's view of Death in Venice by Thomas Mann, for example. "The estate wouldn't let us re-jacket the book. That's happened quite often," Hamilton says. "We've also had to send the visuals to authors in hospitals and we hear back, eOh, no. I loved the jacket I had 35 years ago.'" The American market, as well, has not been opened to the insurgents, and Hamilton doesn't know if it ever will be. (Sneaky American design lovers can, however, order many of the titles from Amazon.co.uk--most are even pictured on the site.)

One New York bookseller was so enamored of the new Penguins that he special-ordered several dozen for a store opening. "I was really struck by The Great Gatsby," says Robert Fader, the buyer for Posman Books' three Manhattan locations. "It's a woman in profile, done in warm colors. It's a really hot-looking cover. I thought we could sell it all over again as a gift, a valentine, anything."

American publishing, Fader feels, is coasting on backlist purchases by educational institutions, which don't care that 1984 has had the same meaningless typographic cover for--seemingly--ever. He contends that in the U.S., new classic covers are usually cheesy movie tie-ins; just take a look at the latest edition of Graham Greene's End of the Affair, for example. "That A&E movie look is instantly dated," Fader says. Or Restoration, by Rose Tremain: "Five years later there's a picture of Robert Downey Jr. on the cover, and the movie didn't do the book justice." The success of the redesigned titles (sans movie stars in lockup) has led Penguin U.K. to devise a new look for hundreds of the books in its Penguin Classics series, adding much more material to what Hamilton sees as the graphic design equivalent of a rave. "I wanted the design to flavor the classics," Hamilton says. "I felt I was like DJ Shadow, taking one bit and mixing it with another."

There's one sample Hamilton knew not to mess with: Tschichold's upright, bean-shaped penguin. Safely housed in an oval, the mascot wanders the new covers, turning up under ice, out of register, and even, on Jerome K. Jerome's Three Men in a Boat, as part of the faux-instructional cover. Ever dignified, the little bird seems perfectly at home in his amplified new surroundings. Alexandra Lange is a contributing editor to New York magazine. Her work has appeared in Graphis, the New York Times, Slate, and Spin, among other publications.