Porcupines
Edited by Graham Higgin
Penguin, 2000

The cover of Porcupines, by an uncredited Penguin designer, is an exhilarating response to the question of how to package a philosophical anthology. It features a photograph of a snowbound pine forest (by American photographer Rod Planck) which is so abstract it barely looks like a photograph at all. The colour palette is too limited – black, white and brown – and the formal structure too rigidly geometric: a cross-hatch of vertical and horizontal lines and bands.

This, perhaps, is what philosophising looks like today – a meticulous teasing apart of the fabric of things. It’s certainly a very different proposition to the Caspar David Friedrich painting on the front of my old Penguin copy of Nietzsche, with its windblown, mountaintop angst. As a more blunt visual metaphor, the image might be an illustration of what philosophy does: it offers a way through the dark forest of life, or – perhaps – helps you sort the wood from the trees. More drolly, it could be a close-up of porcupine quills.

Why Porcupines? Graham Higgin’s anthology is a collection of aphorisms, ordered chronologically by philosopher. Each right-hand page carries a single maxim in large type, while on the opposite page we get it in context in smaller type. The title comes from Schlegel: “A fragment, like a miniature work of art, has to be entirely isolated from the surrounding world and be complete in itself like a porcupine.’’

Finally, the typography. The single, perplexing word of the title is threaded counter-intuitively between the tree trunks, as if playing an impossible game of hide-and-seek. Imagine the letters moving, and it could be part of a cinematic credit sequence.

Therein lies the implicit message of the cover: as it was in the days of Camus and Sartre, philosophy can still be as cool as some hip European art movie.