Penguin Books | Wikipedia audio article
Penguin Books is a British publishing house.
It was co-founded in 1935 by Sir Allen Lane, and his brothers Richard and John, as a line of
the publishers The Bodley Head, only becoming a separate company the following year. Penguin
revolutionized publishing in the 1930s through its inexpensive paperbacks, sold through Woolworths
and other high street stores for sixpence, bringing high-quality paperback fiction and
non-fiction to the mass market. Penguin’s success demonstrated that large audiences
existed for serious books. Penguin also had a significant impact on public debate in Britain,
through its books on British culture, politics, the arts, and science. Penguin Books is now
an imprint of the worldwide Penguin Random House, an emerging conglomerate that was
formed in 2013 by the merger with American publisher Random House. Formerly, Penguin
Group was wholly owned by British Pearson PLC, the global media company that also owned
the Financial Times, but in the new umbrella company, it retains only a minority holding
of 25% of the stock against Random House owner, German media company Bertelsmann, which controls
the majority stake. It is one of the largest English-language publishers, formerly known
as the “Big Six”, now the “Big Five”, along with Holtzbrinck/Macmillan, Hachette, HarperCollins,
and Simon & Schuster.
== Origins == The first Penguin paperbacks were published
in 1935, but at first only as an imprint of The Bodley Head (of Vigo Street) with the
books originally distributed from the crypt of Holy Trinity Church Marylebone. Only paperback
editions were published until the “King Penguin” series debuted in 1939, and later the Pelican
History of Art was undertaken: these were unsuitable as paperbacks because of the length
and copious illustrations on art paper so cloth bindings were chosen instead. Penguin
Books has its registered office in the City of Westminster, London, England. Anecdotally,
Lane recounted how it was his experience with the poor quality of reading material on offer
at Exeter train station that inspired him to create cheap, well-designed quality books
for the mass market. However, the question of how publishers could reach a larger public
had been the subject of a conference at Rippon Hall, Oxford in 1934 at which Lane had been
an attendee. Though the publication of literature in paperback was then associated mainly with
poor-quality lurid fiction, the Penguin brand owed something to the short-lived Albatross
imprint of British and American reprints that briefly traded in 1932.
Inexpensive paperbacks
did not initially appear viable to Bodley Head, since the deliberately low price of
6d. made profitability seem unlikely. This helped Allen Lane purchase publication rights
for some works more cheaply than he otherwise might have done since other publishers were
convinced of the short-term prospects of the business. In the face of resistance from the
traditional book trade it was the purchase of 63,000 books by Woolworths Group that paid
for the project outright, confirmed its worth, and allowed Lane to establish Penguin as a
separate business in 1936. By March 1936, ten months after the company’s launch on 30
July 1935, one million Penguin books had been printed. This early flush of success brought
expansion and the appointment of Eunice Frost, first as a secretary then as editor, and ultimately
as a director, who was to have a pivotal influence in shaping the company. It was Frost who in
1945 was entrusted with the reconstruction of Penguin Inc. after the departure of its
first managing director Ian Ballantine. Penguin Inc. had been incorporated in 1939 to satisfy US copyright law and had enjoyed some success under its vice president Kurt
Enoch with such titles as What Plane Is That and The New Soldier Handbook despite being
a late entrant into an already well-established paperback market.
From the outset, design was essential to the success of the Penguin brand.
Avoiding the
the illustrated gaudiness of other paperback publishers, Penguin opted for the simple appearance of
three horizontal bands, the upper and lower of which were color-coded according to which
series the title belonged to; this is sometimes referred to as the horizontal grid. In the
central white panel, the author and title were printed in Gill Sans, and the upper
band was a cartouche with the legend “Penguin Books”. The initial design was created by
the then 21-year-old office junior Edward Young, who also drew the first version of
the Penguin logo. Series such as Penguin Specials and The Penguin Shakespeare had individual
designs (by 1937 only S1 and B1-B18 had been published).
The color schemes included: orange and white for general fiction, green and white for crime
fiction, cerise and white for travel and adventure, dark blue and white for biographies, yellow
and white for miscellaneous, red and white for drama; and the rarer purple and white
for essays and belles lettres and grey and white for world affairs. Lane actively resisted
the introduction of cover images for several years. Some recent publications of literature
from that time have duplicated the original look.
From 1937 on, the headquarters of Penguin Books was at Harmondsworth west of London
and so it remained until the 1990s when a merge with Viking involved the head office
moving to London.
== War years ==
The Second World War saw the company established as a national institution, and though it had
no formal role, Penguin was integral to the war effort thanks in no small part to the
publication of such bestselling manuals as Keeping Poultry and Rabbits on Scraps and
Aircraft Recognition and supplying books for the services and British POWs. Penguin printed
some 600 titles and started nineteen new series in the six years of the war and a time of
enormous increase in the demand for books, consequently, Penguin enjoyed a privileged
place among its peers. Paper rationing was the besetting problem
of publishers during wartime, with the fall of France cutting off the supply of esparto grass,
one of the constituents of the pulp Penguin used. As such when rationing was introduced
in March 1940 a quota was allocated by the Ministry of Supply to each publisher as a
percentage of the amount used by that firm between August 1938 and August 1939.
This
was particularly advantageous to Penguin who as a volume printer had enjoyed a very successful
year that year. Further, in a deal with the Canadian Government, Penguin had agreed to
exclusively publish editions for their armed forces for which they were paid in tons of
paper. By January 1942 the Book Production War Economy Agreement regulations came into
force which determined rules on paper quality, type size, and margins, consequently, Penguin
eliminated dust jackets, trimmed margins and replaced sewn bindings with metal staples.
Aside from the noticeable deterioration in the appearance of paperbacks, it became a practical
impossibility to publish books of more than 256 pages resulting in some titles falling
out of print for want of material. In addition to their paper allocation Penguin secured
a deal in late 1941, through Bill William’s connections with ABCA and CEMA, with the War
Office to supply the troops with books through what would be known as the Forces Book Club.
Penguin would receive 60 tons a month from Paper Supply in return for 10 titles a month
in runs of 75,000 at 5d. Previously every paperback carried the message “FOR THE FORCES
Leave this book at a Post Office when you have read it so that men and women in the
Services may enjoy it too” at the bottom of the back cover inviting the reader to take
advantage of the free transmission of books to the forces by the Post Office.
However
demand was exceeding supply on the home front leading Lane to seek a monopoly on army books
made specifically for overseas distribution. This dominance over the paper supply put Penguin
in an especially strong position after the war as rationing continued. Many of its competitors
were forced to concede paperback reprint rights to Penguin for this reason as well as the
popular prestige the company enjoyed. == Post-war history ==
See also R v Penguin Books Ltd. In 1945, Penguin began what would become one
of its most important branches, the Penguin Classics, with a translation of Homer’s Odyssey
by E.
V. Rieu. Between 1947 and 1949, the German typographer Jan Tschichold redesigned
500 Penguin books, and left Penguin with a set of influential rules of design principles
brought together as the Penguin Composition Rules, a four-page booklet of typographic
instructions for editors and compositors. Tschichold’s work included the woodcut illustrated
covers of the classics series (also known as the medallion series), and with Hans Schmoller,
his eventual successor at Penguin, the vertical grid covers that became the standard for Penguin
fiction throughout the 1950s. By this time the paperback industry in the UK had begun
to grow, and Penguin found itself in competition with the fledgling Pan Books. Many other
series were published such as The Buildings of England, the Pelican History of Art, and
Penguin Education. By 1960, several forces were shaping
the direction of the company, the publication list, and its graphic design. On 20 April 1961,
Penguin became a publicly listed company on the London Stock Exchange; consequently, Allen
Lane had a diminished role at the firm though he was to continue as Managing Director.
New
techniques such as phototypesetting and offset-litho printing were to replace hot metal and letterpress
printing, dramatically reducing cost and permitting the printing of images and text on the same
paper stock, thus paving the way for the introduction of photography and novel approaches to graphic
design on paperback covers. In May 1960, Tony Godwin was appointed as editorial adviser,
rapidly rising to Chief Editor from which position he sought to broaden the range of
Penguin’s list and keep up with new developments in graphic design. To this end, he hired Germano
Facetti in January 1961, was to decisively alter the appearance of the Penguin brand.
Beginning with the crime series, Facetti canvassed the opinions of several designers including
Romek Marber for a new look at the Penguin cover. It was Marber’s suggestion of what
came to be called the Marber grid along with the retention of traditional Penguin colour-coding
that was to replace the previous three horizontal bar designs and set the pattern for the design
of the company’s paperbacks for the next twenty years. Facetti rolled out the new treatment
across the Penguin line starting with crime, the orange fiction series, then Pelicans,
Penguin Modern Classics, Penguin Specials, and Penguin Classics give an overall visual
unity to the company’s list.
A somewhat different approach was taken to the Peregrine, Penguin
Poets, Penguin Modern Poets, and Penguin Plays series. There were over a hundred different
series published in total. Just as Lane judged the public’s appetite
for paperbacks in the 1930s, his decision to publish Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D. H.
Lawrence in 1960 boosted Penguin’s notoriety. The novel was at the time unpublished in the
The United Kingdom and the predicted obscenity trial not only marked Penguin as a fearless
publisher, but it also helped drive the sale of at least 3.5 million copies. Penguin’s victory
in the case heralded the end to the censorship of books in the UK, although censorship of
the written word was only finally defeated after the Inside Linda Lovelace trial of 1978. == Pearson takeover ==
By the end of the 1960s Penguin was in financial trouble, and several proposals were made for
a new operating structure. These included ownership by a consortium of universities,
or joint ownership by the Cambridge University Press and Oxford University Press, but none
of them came to anything.
Sir Allen Lane died on 7 July, and six weeks later, Penguin was
acquired by Pearson PLC on 21 August 1970. A new emphasis on profitability emerged and,
with the departure of Facetti in 1972, the defining era of Penguin book design came to
an end. Later changes included the disappearance of ‘Harmondsworth’ as the place of publication:
this was replaced by a London office address. From 1937 the headquarters of Penguin Books
was at Harmondsworth west of London and so it remained until the 1990s when a merger
with Viking involved the head office moving into London (27 Wrights Lane, W8 5TZ).
In 1985 Penguin purchased British hardback publisher Michael Joseph and in 1986 Hamish
Hamilton. Also in 1986, Penguin purchased the American publisher New American Library (NAL)
and its hard-cover affiliate E. P. Dutton. New American Library had originally been Penguin
U.S.A. had been spun off in 1948 because of the high complexity of import and export
regulations. Penguin repurchased it to extend its reach into the US market, and
NAL saw the move as a way to gain a hold in international markets. Penguin published Deborah
Lipstadt’s book Denying the Holocaust accused David Irving of Holocaust denial.
Irving sued Lipstadt and Penguin for libel in 1998 but lost in a much-publicized court
case.
Other titles published by Penguin which gained media attention, and controversy, include
Massacre by Siné, Spycatcher, which was suppressed in the UK by the government for a time, and
The Satanic Verses, led to its author Salman Rushdie having to go into hiding for
some years after Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran issued a Fatwā, an edict amounting to a sentence
of death against him. In 2006, Penguin attempted to involve the
public in collaboratively writing a novel on a wiki platform. They named this project
A Million Penguins. On 7 March 2007, the Penguin Books UK blog announced that the project had
come to an end. In 2014, the Penguin Hotline was created by Madeline McIntosh. An orange
commemorative plaque was unveiled at Exeter train station in May 2017 to mark Lane’s significant
contribution to the publishing industry.
== Imprints and series == === Penguin Classics === Consonant with Penguin’s corporate mission
to bring canonical literature to the mass market the company first ventured into publishing
the classics in May 1938 with the issue of Penguin Illustrated Classics. The savings
from the author’s rights on these royalty-free titles were instead invested in commissioning
woodcut engravings from Robert Gibbings and his circle emanating from the Central School
of Arts and Crafts. The books were distinct from the rest of the Penguin marque in their
use of a vertical grid (anticipating Tschichold’s innovation of 1951) and Albertus’s typeface.
The series was not a financial success and the list ceased after just ten volumes the
same year it began. Penguin returned to classics with the printing of E. V. Rieu’s translation
of Homer’s Odyssey in 1946, which went on to sell three million copies. Penguin’s commercial
motivation was, as ever, populist; rendering the classics in an approachable modern English
was therefore a difficult task whose execution did not always satisfy the critics. Dr Rieu
said of his work “I have done my best to make Homer easy reading for those who are
unfamiliar with the Greek world.” He was joined in 1959 by Betty Radice who was first his
assistant then, after his retirement in 1964, she assumed the role of joint editor with
Robert Baldick.
As the publisher’s focus changed from the needs of the marketplace to those
of the classroom the criticism became more acute, Thomas Gould wrote of the series “Most
of the philosophical volumes in the Penguin series are bad – some very bad indeed. Since
Plato and Aristotle are the most-read philosophers in the world today and since some of these
Penguin translations are favorites among professional philosophers in several countries,
this amounts to a minor crisis in the history of philosophy.”The imprint publishes hundreds
of classics from the Greeks and Romans to Victorian Literature to modern classics. For
nearly twenty years, variously colored borders on the front and back covers indicated the
original language. The second period of design meant largely black covers with a color illustration
on the front.
In 2002, Penguin announced it was redesigning its entire catalog, merging
the original Classics list (known in the trade as “Black Classics”) with what had been the
old Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics list, though the silver covers for the latter have
so far been retained for most of the titles. Previously this line had been called ‘Penguin
Modern Classics’ with a pale green livery. The redesign — featuring a colorful painting
on the cover, with a black background and orange lettering — was well received. However,
the quality of the paperbacks themselves seemed to decrease: the spines were more likely to
fold and bend. The paperbacks are also printed on non-acid-free pulp paper, which, by some
accounts, tends to be yellow and brown within a couple of years. The text page design was
also overhauled to follow a more closely prescribed template, allowing for faster copyediting
and typesetting, but reducing the options for individual design variations suggested
by a text’s structure or historical context (for example, in the choice of text typeface).
Before 2002, the text page typography of each book in the Classics series had been
overseen by a team of in-house designers; this department was drastically reduced in
2003 as part of the production costs.
The in-house text design department still exists,
albeit much smaller than formerly. Recent design work includes the Penguin Little Black
Classic series. === Pelican Books === Lane expanded the business in 1937 with the
publication of George Bernard Shaw’s The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism and Capitalism
under the Pelican Books imprint, an imprint designed to educate the reading public rather
than entertain. Recognizing his limitations Lane appointed V. K. Krishna Menon as the
first commissioning editor of the series, supported by an advisory panel consisting
of Peter Chalmers Mitchell, H. L. Bales, and W. E. Williams. Several thousand Pelicans
were published over the next half-century and brought high-quality accounts of the current
state of knowledge in many fields, often written by authors of specialized academic books.
(The Pelican series, in decline for several years, was finally discontinued in 1984.)
Aircraft Recognition (S82) by R. A. Saville-Sneath, was a bestseller. In 1940, the children’s
imprint Puffin Books began with a series of non-fiction picture books; the first work
of children’s fiction published under the imprint was Barbara Euphan Todd’s Worzel Gummidge
the following year.
Another series that began in wartime was the Penguin Poets: the first
volume was a selection of Tennyson’s poems (D1) in 1941. Later examples are The Penguin
Book of Modern American Verse (D22), 1954, and The Penguin Book of Restoration Verse
(D108), 1968. J. M. Cohen’s Comic and Curious Verse appeared in three volumes over several years. Pelican Books was relaunched as a digital
imprint in 2014, with four books published simultaneously on 1 May: Economics: A User’s
Guide by Ha-Joon Chang, The Domesticated Brain by the psychologist Bruce Hood, Revolutionary
Russia by Orlando Figes and Human Evolution by the anthropologist Robin Dunbar. === Penguin Education === In 1965 Penguin entered the field of educational
publishing, Allen Lane aims to carry the radical and populist spirit of Pelicans
into the schoolbook market.
His final major initiative, the division was established as
a separate publishing operation from Harmondsworth, and based in West Drayton in Middlesex. During
its nine-year life, it had a major impact on school books, breaking new ground in their
concept and design and strongly influencing other publishers’ lists.
Among the most successful and influential series were Voices and Junior Voices, Connexions,
and the Penguin English Project. Alongside these and other series, the imprint continued
another Penguin tradition by producing Education Specials, titles which focussed on often controversial
topics within education and beyond. They included highly topical books such as The Hornsey Affair
and Warwick University Ltd, reflecting the student unrest of the late 1960s and contributing
to the intense national debate about the purpose of higher education.
Other titles featured
the radical and influential ideas about schooling propounded by writers and teachers from America
and elsewhere. Penguin Education also published an extensive
range of Readers and introductory texts for students in higher education, notably in subjects
such as psychology, economics, management, sociology and science, while for teachers
it provided a series of key texts such as Language, the Learner and the School, and The
Language of Primary School Children. Following Allen Lane’s death in 1970 and the takeover
the same year by Pearson Longman, the division discontinued publishing school books and was
closed in March 1974. More than 80 teachers, educational journalists, and academics signed
a letter to the Times Educational Supplement regretting the closure of the influential
imprint === Penguin Specials ===
In November 1937, Penguin inaugurated a new series of short, polemical books under the
rubric of Penguin Specials with the publication of Edgar Mowrer’s Germany Puts the Clock Back.
Their purpose was to offer an in-depth analysis of current affairs that would counter the
perceived bias of the newspapers in addition to being the company’s response to the popularity
of Gollancz’s Left Book Club.
Whereas the Left Book Club was avowedly pro-Soviet, Penguin
and Lane expressed no political preference as their editorial policy, though the widespread
belief was that the series was left-leaning since the editor was the communist John Lehmann
and its authors were, with a few exceptions, men of the left. Speed of publication and
delivery (a turnaround of weeks rather than months) was essential to the topicality and
therefore success of the Specials, Genevieve Tabouis’s anti-appeasement tract Blackmail
or War sold over 200,000 copies for example.
However, even this immediacy did not prevent
them from being overtaken by events: Shiela Grant Duff’s Europe and the Czechs only made it
onto the bookstands on the day of the Munich agreement but went on to be
a bestseller. Thirty-five Penguin Specials were published before the outbreak of war,
including two novels Hašek’s Good Soldier Schweik and Bottome’s The Mortal Storm; they
collectively made a significant contribution to the public debate of the time, with many
of the more controversial titles being the subject of leading articles in the press.
After a hiatus between 1945 and 1949, the Penguin Specials continued after the war under
the editorship of first Tom Maschler, then after 1961 Tony Godwin. The first title in
the revived series was William Gallacher’s The Case for Communism. Godwin initiated the
“What’s Wrong with Britain” series of Specials in the run-up to the 1964 election, which
constituted a platform for the New Left’s brand of cultural analysis that characterized
the leftist political radicalism of the 1960s. Indeed, Penguin Books contributed to the funds
that set up Richard Hoggart and Stuart Hall’s Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at
Birmingham University in 1964.
This brief period of revival for Penguin Specials in
contributing to the national dialogue was not sustained after the departure of Godwin
in 1967, with the rise in television journalism, the Specials series declined in significance
through the 1970s and 1980s. The last Special was published in 1988 with Keith Thompson’s
Under Siege: Racism and Violence in Britain Today.
In December 2011, Penguin launched nine titles as ‘Penguin Shorts’ which featured the iconic
tri-band covers. These books were novellas and short-length works of fiction and/or memoirs.
In 2012 they became known as Penguin Specials following an agreement with The Economist
in March of that year which focused on the kind of topical journalism that was a feature
of the original Penguin Specials.
Subsequent Penguin Specials released in 2012 and 2013
continued to include both fiction, including the publication of the works shortlisted for
the Monash Undergraduate Prize 2012, and topical journalism. As well as collected columns of
cultural critics. === Puffin === Noel Carrington, an editor at Country Life
magazine, first approached Lane with the idea of publishing low-cost, illustrated non-fiction
children’s books in 1938. Inspired by the Editions Père Castor books drawn by Rojan
and the technique of autolithography used in the poster art of the time, Carrington’s
suggestion for what was to become the Puffin Picture Book series was adopted by Penguin
in 1940 when, as Lane saw it, evacuated city children would need books on farming and natural
history to help adjust to the country. The first four titles appeared in December 1940;
War on Land, War at Sea, War in the Air, and On the Farm, and a further nine the following
year. Despite Lane’s intention to publish twelve a-year papers staff shortages meant
only thirteen were issued in the first two years of the series. The Picture Books’ 120
titles resulted in 260 variants altogether, the last number 116 Paxton Chadwick’s Life
Histories were issued hors série in 1996 by the Penguin Collector’s Society.
Inexpensive paperback children’s fiction did not exist at the time Penguin sought to expand
their list into this new market.
To this end, Eleanor Graham was appointed in 1941 as the
the first editor of the Puffin Story Books series, a venture made particularly difficult due
to the resistance of publishers and librarians in releasing the rights of their children’s
books. The first five titles, Worzel Gummidge, Cornish Adventure, The Cuckoo Clock, Garram
the Hunter and Smokey were published in the Three Horizontal Stripes company livery of
the rest of the Penguin output, a practice abandoned after the ninth volume when full-bleed
Color-illustrated covers were introduced, a fact that heralded the much greater design
freedom of the Puffin series over the rest of Penguin’s books.
Graham retired in 1961 and was replaced by Kaye Webb who presided over the department
for 18 years in a period that saw greatly increased competition in the children’s market
as well as a greater sophistication in production and marketing.
One innovation of Webb’s was
the creation of the Puffin Club in 1967 and its quarterly magazine Puffin Post, which
at its height had 200,000 members. The Puffin authors’ list added Arthur Ransome, Roald
Dahl and Ursula K. Le Guin during Webb’s editorship and saw the creation of the Peacock series
of teenage fiction. Tony Lacey took over Webb’s editorial chair
in 1979 at the invitation of Penguin managing director Peter Mayer when Puffin was one of
the few profitable divisions of the beleaguered company. In line with Mayer’s policy of more
aggressive commercialization of the Penguin brand, Lacey reduced the number of Puffin imprints,
consolidated popular titles under the Puffin Classics rubric, and inaugurated the successful
interactive gamebook series Fighting Fantasy. Complimentary to the Puffin Club the Puffin
School Book Club, addressed specifically to schools and organizations, grew significantly
in this period helping to confirm the Puffin market position such that by 1983 one in three Penguin
books sold was a Puffin. === The Buildings of England === Nikolaus Pevsner first proposed a series of
volumes amounting to a county-by-county survey of the monuments of England in ten or more
books to both the Cambridge University Press and Routledge before the war, however for
various reasons his plan came to nothing.
It was only through his involvement with Penguin
that he was in a position to make a similar suggestion to Allen Lane and be accepted.
Pevsner described the project of the Buildings of England as an attempt to fill the gap in
English publishing for those multi-volume surveys of national art familiar on the continent.
In particular, Georg Dehio’s Handbuch der Deutschen Kunstdenkmaler, a topographical inventory
of Germany’s important historic buildings was published in five volumes between
1905 and 1912. Though Pevsner’s ambition for the series was to educate and inform the general
public on the subtleties of English architectural history, the immediate commercial imperative
was competition with the Shell Guides edited by John Betjeman of which 13 had been published
by 1939. With Lane’s agreement in 1945, Pevsner began work personally touring the county that
was to be the subject of observation aided by notes drawn up by researchers.
The first
volume, Cornwall, appeared in 1951 and went on to produce 46 architectural guidebooks
between then and 1974 of which he wrote 32 alone and ten with assistance. As early as
1954 the series was in commercial difficulty and required sponsorship to continue, a grant
from the Leverhulme Trust amongst other sources secured its completion. The series continued
after Pevsner died in 1983, financed in part by the Pevsner Books Trust and published
by Yale University Press. Pevsner’s approach was of Kunstgeschichte
quite distinct from the antiquarian interest of local and family history typical of English
county histories.
Consequently, there is little mention of monumental brasses, bells, tracery,
the relationship of the building to the landscape. Nor is there much discussion on building techniques,
nor industrial architecture, nor on Art Deco buildings, omissions that his critics hold
have led to those subjects’ undervaluation and neglect. Nevertheless, Pevsner’s synoptic
study brought rigorous architectural history to an appreciative mass audience, in particular
he enlarged the perception of Victorian achievement in architecture. === Magazine publishing ===
Wartime paper rationing, which had resulted in a generous allocation to Penguin, also
forced the reduction in space for book reviews and advertising in the newspapers and was
partly the cause of the folding of several literary journals consequently leaving a gap
in the magazine market that Lane hoped to fill.
In January 1941 the first issue of Penguin
New Writing appeared and instantly dominated the market with 80,000 copies sold compared
to its closest rival, Cyril Connolly’s Horizon, which mustered 3,500 sales in its first edition.
Penguin New Writing’s editor John Lehmann was instrumental in introducing the British
public to such new writers as Lawrence Durrell, Saul Bellow, and James Michie.
Yet despite
popular and critical success further rationing and, after 1945 declining sales, which led to monthly
publication to become quarterly until the journal finally closed in the autumn of 1950 after
40 issues. Though New Writing was the most durable of
Penguin’s periodicals it wasn’t the publisher’s only foray into journalism with Russian Review,
Penguin Hansard and Transatlantic began during the war, and Penguin Film Review, Penguin
Music Magazine, New Biology, Penguin Parade, Penguin Science Survey and Penguin Science
News having brief runs after. === Popular Penguins ===
Penguin’s Australian subsidiary released the Popular Penguins series late in 2008. The
series has its website. It was intended to include 50 titles, many of which duplicate
those on the Penguin Celebrations list but this was reduced to 49 titles as one of the
50, Hegemony or Survival by Noam Chomsky, had to be withdrawn after its initial release
as Penguin discovered they no longer held the rights to it.
Popular Penguins are presented as a return to Lane’s original ethos – good books at
affordable prices.
They have been published with a cover price of A$9.95, less than half
of the average price of a paperback novel in Australia at the time of release.
Popular Penguins are presented in a more “authentic” interpretation of the Penguin Grid than that
of the Celebrations series. They are the correct size when compared to an original ‘grid-era’
Penguin, and use Eric Gill’s typefaces in a more or less exact match for Jan Tschichold’s
“tidying” of Edward Young’s original three-panel cover design. The covers are also printed
on a card stock that mirrors the look and feel of the 1940s and 50s Penguin covers.
On the
other hand, all of the Popular Penguins series are in Penguin Orange, and not colour-coded
in the manner of the original designs and the “Celebrations” titles.
In July 2009, another 50 Popular Penguins were released onto the Australian and New
Zealand markets. A further 10 titles written by New Zealand authors were released in March
2010. Another 75 titles were released in Australia in July 2010 to mark Penguin’s 75th anniversary. === King Penguin Books ===
King Penguin Books was a series of pocket-sized monographs published by Penguin Books between
1939 and 1959. They were in imitation of the Insel-Bücherei series published in Germany
by Insel Verlag from 1912 onwards, and were pioneer volumes for Penguins in that they
were their first volumes with hard covers and their first with colour printing.
The books originally combined a classic series of color plates with an authoritative text.
The first two volumes featured sixteen plates from John Gould’s The Birds of Great Britain
(1873) with a historical introduction and commentary on each plate by Phyllis Barclay-Smith, and
sixteen plates from Redouté’s Roses (1817–24) with historical introduction and commentary
by John Ramsbottom.
The third volume began the alternative practice of color plates
from a variety of sources. Some of the volumes, such as Nikolaus Pevsner’s
Leaves of Southwell (1945) or Wilfrid Blunt’s Tulipomania (1950) were pioneering works of
scholarship. Others such as The Bayeux Tapestry by Eric Maclagan (1943), Ur: The First Phases
by Leonard Woolley (1946), or Russian Icons (1947) by David Talbot Rice were distillations
by experts of their pioneering works. Some volumes by experts went into revised
editions, such as A Book of English Clocks (1947 and 1950) by R. W. Symonds.
Elizabeth Senior edited the series until 1941, after which Nikolaus Pevsner took over and
remained editor until the end of the series.
The series ran to 76 volumes. === Pelican History of Art ===
Allen Lane approached Nikolaus Pevsner in 1945 for a series of illustrated books that
would match the success of the King Penguins. Pevsner recalled his response: “Allen said,
‘You have done the King Penguins now and we are going on with them, but if you had your
way, what else would you do?’ I had my answer ready—and the answer was very formidable,
because I outlined both The Pelican History of Art and The Buildings of England on the
spot, each about 40 to 50 volumes.
Allen said, ‘Yes, we can do both,’ and that was the end
of the meeting.” Pevsner’s industry quickly bore fruit with the first contracts signed
by 1946 for John Summerson’s Architecture in Britain, Anthony Blunt’s Art and Architecture
in France, and Rudolph Wittkower’s Italian Art and Architecture, the first title Painting
in Britain, 1530-1790 by Ellis Waterhouse was issued in 1953. By 1955, Pevsner produced
a prospectus for the series announcing the publication of four new volumes and a plan
for the rest of the series totaling 47 titles. The ambition of the series exceeded previously
published multi-volume histories of art such as André Michel’s Histoire de l’art (17 vols,
1905–28), the Propyläen Kunstgeschichte (25 vols, 1923–35). Forty-one volumes were
published by the time Pevsner retired from editing in 1977, his work was continued by
his editorial assistant on the Buildings of England Judy Nairn, and the medievalist Peter
Lasko.
Yale University Press acquired the series in 1992 when 45 titles had been completed,
by 2004 they had published 21 volumes, mostly revisions of existing editions. For Penguin
the series was a departure from their commercial mainstay of paperbacks as the histories of
art were the first large format, illustrated hardback books they had produced. Despite
their relatively high price, they were a financial success, yet for Pevsner, they were intended
primarily as graduate-level texts in what was, for the English-speaking world, the newly
emerging academic discipline of art history. Nevertheless, the series was criticized from
within the academy for its evident biases. Many of its authors were German émigrés,
consequently, there was a methodological preference for the Kunst Wissenschaft practiced in Vienna
and Berlin between the wars; a formalism that ignored the social context of art. Moreover,
the weight given to some subjects seemed disproportionate to some critics, with seven of its 47 volumes
dedicated to English art, a “tributary of the main European current” as the Burlington
Magazine observed.
Though the 1955 plan was never fully executed—the volumes on Greek
painting and sculpture, quattrocento painting and Cinquecento sculpture were not written—the
Pelican History remains one of the most comprehensive surveys of world art published. === Penguin on Wheels ===
Mobile bookstore launched by Penguin Books India in collaboration with Ms. Satabdi Mishra
and Mr. Akshaya Rautaray. == In popular culture ==
Penguin restaurant in Nahariya, Israel, founded in 1940, was named after Penguin Books. Some
80 years later the restaurant continues to be a successful outlet on the Ga’aton River,
still managed by the founding family. == See also ==
Penguin Collectors Society List of Penguin Classics
Penguin 60s Classics Penguin Red Classics
Penguin Essentials List of Early Puffin Story Books
Penguin poetry anthologies Penguin Modern Poets
New Penguin Shakespeare Great Books of the 20th Century
Penguin Books Ltd. v India Book Distributors and Others
Everyman’s Library Paperback
Tauchnitz publishers ==
Notes and references == == Further reading == == External links ==
Official websites Penguin Books USA
Penguin Books UKOther Penguin Archive University of Bristol Library
Special Collections Penguin Archive Project University of Bristol
King Penguin Book Series King Penguin Book Series
The Art of Penguin Science Fiction The History and Cover Art of Science Fiction published
by Penguin Books from 1935 to the present day
Penguin First Editions Guide to the Early (1935-1955) first editions published by Penguin
Books Penguin book covers
Penguin Cerise Travel Celebrating Penguin Books’ Early ‘Travel and Adventure’ series
Foley Collection — articles and extensive lists
History of the Penguin Archive by Toby Clements, The Telegraph, 19 February 2009.
Archival Material at Leeds University Library
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