Penguin Books

• 1. Introduction

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  Penguin Books traces its own founding story to a railway platform at Exeter St Davids. Allen Lane later said he could find nothing worth reading at the station bookstall there. That frustration, by his own account, pushed him toward an idea most publishers considered reckless. It meant cheap, well designed books, sold everywhere, not only in bookshops. The company built from that idea would later fight in court for the right to print an uncensored novel. It would survive a war that cut off its raw materials. It would pass through the hands of several corporate owners in turn. How did a publisher built on paperbacks costing a few pence end up shaping British reading habits? How did its cover designs become almost as recognisable as the books themselves? And how did a business that traditional publishers dismissed become part of one of the largest English-language publishing groups in the world?

• 2. A Sixpenny Bet

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  Allen Lane launched Penguin Books on the 30th of July 1935, together with his brothers Richard and John. The imprint began life inside The Bodley Head, operating out of Vigo Street in London. Its earliest stock was stored in the crypt of Holy Trinity Church in Marylebone. A year earlier, in 1934, Lane had attended a conference at Rippon Hall in Oxford on how publishers might reach a wider public. Paperback fiction already existed, mostly as pulp, and a short-lived British and American reprint imprint called Albatross had traded briefly in 1932.

  Lane wanted the new imprint's mascot to be, in his own words, dignified but flippant. His secretary, Joan Coles, suggested a penguin, and the idea stuck. Lane and his brothers agreed to name the publisher Penguin Books. The Bodley Head itself doubted the plan would work, since Lane's chosen price of sixpence made profitability look unlikely. That scepticism turned out to help him. Because other publishers were equally unconvinced, Lane bought publication rights more cheaply than he otherwise might have.

  It was an order of 63,000 books from Woolworths that changed the calculation. That single purchase paid for the entire project outright and proved the business could work. On the strength of it, Lane established Penguin as a company separate from The Bodley Head in 1936. Ten months after the July 1935 launch, by March 1936, Penguin had printed its one millionth book. Only paperback editions followed until 1939. That year, the King Penguin series introduced hardbacks, bound in cloth for works too long or too heavily illustrated to print cheaply.

  Penguin Books Inc was incorporated in the United States in 1939, largely to satisfy American copyright law. It arrived late to an already crowded paperback market. Even so, it found success under vice president Kurt Enoch with titles such as What Plane Is That and The New Soldier Handbook. Growth brought Eunice Frost into the company, first as a secretary, then as an editor, and eventually as a director. In 1945, after the departure of the American branch's first managing director, Ian Ballantine, Frost was entrusted with rebuilding Penguin Inc.

  By 1937, Penguin's next big decisions, about how its books should look and where the company would be based, were still ahead of it.

• 3. Design as Strategy

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  Penguin's earliest paperbacks used what became known as the horizontal grid. Three coloured bands framed a plain white middle panel, where the author and title appeared in Gill Sans type. The upper band carried a small cartouche reading Penguin Books. Genre decided the colours. Orange and white marked general fiction, green and white marked crime, cerise and white marked travel and adventure, dark blue and white marked biography. Yellow and white signalled miscellaneous titles, red and white signalled drama, purple and white signalled essays and belles lettres, grey and white signalled world affairs. An office junior of twenty one, Edward Young, created this layout and drew the first version of the Penguin logo. Lane resisted putting any illustration on the covers for years. Series such as the Penguin Shakespeare kept their own separate designs. By 1937, only a handful of volumes in that line, numbered S1 and B1 through B18, had appeared. That same year, Penguin settled its headquarters at Harmondsworth in Middlesex, now part of Greater London.

  Between 1947 and 1949, the German typographer Jan Tschichold redesigned five hundred Penguin books. He left behind the Penguin Composition Rules, a four page booklet of typographic instructions for editors and compositors. Tschichold's work included woodcut covers for the classics series, sometimes called the medallion series. Working with Hans Schmoller, his eventual successor, Tschichold also created vertical grid covers that became the standard for Penguin fiction through the 1950s. By then the UK paperback market had grown enough to bring Penguin into competition with a fledgling rival, Pan Books.

  Phototypesetting and offset litho soon began replacing hot metal and letterpress printing, cutting costs and allowing photography onto the same paper stock as text. In May 1960, Tony Godwin was appointed editorial adviser and rose quickly to Chief Editor, determined to widen Penguin's list and modernise its graphic design. To do that, he hired Germano Facetti in January 1961. Facetti canvassed a number of designers, including Romek Marber, for a new look for the crime series. Marber's suggestion, paired with Penguin's existing colour coding, became known as the Marber grid. It replaced the old three band design and set the pattern for Penguin's paperbacks for the next twenty years. Facetti rolled the new look out across the crime line, the orange fiction series, the Pelicans, Penguin Modern Classics, Penguin Specials, and Penguin Classics. This gave the company's list a single visual identity. The Peregrine, Penguin Poets, Penguin Modern Poets, and Penguin Plays series took a somewhat different approach. Penguin published more than a hundred series in total. Facetti left the company in 1972, closing out what is remembered as the defining era of Penguin's book design.

  Design decisions like these ran alongside a much harder problem for Penguin during the war years, keeping the presses supplied with paper at all.

• 4. Paper Under Rationing

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  The Second World War turned Penguin into something close to a national institution, despite having no formal role in the war effort. It printed roughly 600 titles during the war and launched 19 new series, including the bestselling manual Keeping Poultry and Rabbits on Scraps. Books went out to the armed services and to British prisoners of war. The Fall of France cut off the supply of esparto grass, one of the ingredients in the pulp Penguin used for paper.

  Paper rationing began in March 1940. The Ministry of Supply set each publisher's quota as a percentage of how much paper it had used between August 1938 and August 1939. Because Penguin had been a high volume printer during that reference period, the rationing scheme worked strongly in its favour. Separately, Penguin struck a deal with the Canadian government to publish editions exclusively for Canada's armed forces. Payment came in tons of paper rather than cash.

  In January 1942, new regulations under the Book Production War Economy Agreement fixed rules on paper quality, type size, and page margins. Penguin responded by dropping dust jackets, trimming margins, and swapping sewn bindings for metal staples. Books over 256 pages became a practical impossibility, and some titles simply fell out of print for lack of material. In 1941, Penguin secured a further deal with the War Office. The connection came through Bill Williams's ties to the Army Bureau of Current Affairs and the Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts. Under what became known as the Forces Book Club, Penguin received 60 tons of paper a month from Paper Supply. In exchange, it produced 10 titles a month in print runs of 75,000, priced at fivepence each.

  Every wartime Penguin carried a printed appeal on the back cover. It asked readers to leave the book at a Post Office once finished, so servicemen and women could read it too. This took advantage of the Royal Mail's free postage for books to the forces. Demand at home outstripped supply, and Lane pushed to secure something close to a monopoly on books produced specifically for troops overseas. Penguin already held an established paper supply once the war ended, and rationing continued afterward. Many competitors had little choice but to hand over paperback reprint rights to it.

  That paper advantage, and the goodwill it bought Penguin among readers, would carry the company forward after the war. The next fight was fought in courtrooms, not over raw materials.

• 5. Under New Ownership

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  By the end of the 1960s, Penguin was in financial trouble, and several rescue plans surfaced. One proposal floated ownership by a consortium of universities, another joint ownership between the Cambridge University Press and the Oxford University Press. Neither went anywhere. Allen Lane died on the 7th of July 1970. Six weeks later, on the 21st of August 1970, Pearson PLC acquired Penguin. A new emphasis on profitability followed, and Penguin merged with the long established American publisher Viking Press in 1975.

  Two decades earlier, on the 20th of April 1961, Penguin had become a publicly listed company on the London Stock Exchange. That step left Lane with a reduced role at the firm he had founded. He remained managing director all the same. Under Pearson, Penguin kept expanding. The first Penguin Bookshop opened in Covent Garden in 1980. Penguin purchased the British hardback publisher Michael Joseph in 1985, then Hamish Hamilton in 1986. It then moved its offices to 27 Wrights Lane in central London. That ended Harmondsworth's half century run as the place of publication, though the Harmondsworth warehouse itself stayed in operation until 2004.

  In 1986, Penguin also bought the American publisher New American Library and its hardcover affiliate E. P. Dutton. New American Library had originally been Penguin USA, spun off in 1948 because of the complexity of import and export regulations. Buying it back gave Penguin renewed reach into the American market, while New American Library saw the deal as its own route into international markets.

  Lane had judged the public's appetite for paperbacks correctly in the 1930s. In 1960, his decision to publish Lady Chatterley's Lover by D. H. Lawrence boosted Penguin's notoriety in a new way. The novel had never been published in the United Kingdom. The predicted obscenity trial, R v Penguin Books Ltd, marked Penguin as a fearless publisher. It also helped drive the sale of at least 3.5 million copies. Penguin's win ended most book censorship in the UK. Full censorship of the written word was not defeated until the Inside Linda Lovelace trial of 1978. Other courtroom fights followed. In 1998, David Irving sued the historian Deborah Lipstadt and Penguin for libel. Her book, Denying the Holocaust, had accused him of Holocaust denial; he lost the widely publicised case, known as Irving v Penguin Books and Lipstadt. Other Penguin titles drew government attention and public controversy in turn. Among them were Massacre by Sine and Spycatcher, which the UK government suppressed for a time. The most serious case involved The Satanic Verses. Its author, Salman Rushdie, went into hiding for years afterward. Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran had issued a Fatwa against him, an edict amounting to a death sentence.

  Penguin also tried newer, stranger experiments. In 2006 it launched A Million Penguins, an attempt to let the public collaboratively write a novel on a wiki. The Penguin Books UK blog announced the project's end on the 7th of March 2007. In 2014, Madeline McIntosh created the Penguin Hotline. In May 2017, an orange commemorative plaque was unveiled at Exeter railway station to mark Lane's contribution to publishing.

  Penguin Group had by then long been wholly owned by Pearson plc, the British media company that also owned the Financial Times. Penguin Random House was formed in 2013 through a merger with the American publisher Random House, itself a subsidiary of the German conglomerate Bertelsmann. Pearson held a 47 per cent stake in the new company. That stake fell to 25 per cent in July 2017, and since April 2020 Penguin Random House has been wholly owned by Bertelsmann. Penguin now sits within the Big Five, the group of the largest English-language publishers, alongside Holtzbrinck-Macmillan, Hachette, HarperCollins, and Simon & Schuster.

  Long before any of these corporate mergers, Penguin had already staked its reputation on a different kind of gamble. It meant publishing serious books the mass market had never been trusted with before.

• 6. Educating a Mass Readership

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  In May 1938, Penguin ventured into the classics for the first time with the Penguin Illustrated Classics series. The titles were out of copyright and required no royalty payments. Penguin invested the savings into commissioning wood engravings from Robert Gibbings and his circle at the Central School of Arts and Crafts. The series was not a commercial success, and the list ended after just ten volumes in its first year. Penguin returned to the classics in 1946 with E. V. Rieu's translation of Homer's Odyssey, which went on to sell three million copies. Rieu himself said of the work, "I have done my best to make Homer easy reading for those who are unfamiliar with the Greek world." Betty Radice joined him as assistant in 1959, then became joint editor with Robert Baldick after Rieu's retirement in 1964. As the series shifted from general readers toward classroom use, criticism sharpened. The scholar Thomas Gould offered a harsher verdict, writing that "most of the philosophical volumes in the Penguin series are bad. Some very bad indeed." Since Plato and Aristotle were the most read philosophers in the world at the time, Gould added, "this amounts to a minor crisis in the history of philosophy." In 2002, Penguin merged its original Classics list with the Penguin Twentieth Century Classics list. The whole catalogue got a new look, a colourful cover painting on a black background with orange lettering. The redesign was well received. But the paperbacks themselves grew flimsier, with spines prone to bending and non acid free paper that tended to yellow within a couple of years.

  In 1937, Lane expanded into non-fiction with George Bernard Shaw's The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism and Capitalism. It launched the Pelican Books imprint, meant to educate readers rather than entertain them. He appointed V. K. Krishna Menon as the series' first commissioning editor, backed by an advisory panel of Peter Chalmers Mitchell, H. L. Bales, and W. E. Williams. Several thousand Pelicans followed over the next fifty years. Academics often wrote them, summarising their own specialised research for a general audience, until the series was discontinued in 1984. A companion poetry line, Penguin Poets, began in 1941 with a selection of Tennyson. Later volumes included The Penguin Book of Modern American Verse in 1954 and The Penguin Book of Restoration Verse in 1968. Pelican itself returned in 2014 as a digital imprint. On the 1st of May, it launched four titles simultaneously. They were Economics: A User's Guide by Ha-Joon Chang and The Domesticated Brain by the psychologist Bruce Hood. Also included were Revolutionary Russia by Orlando Figes and Human Evolution by the anthropologist Robin Dunbar.

  Lane carried that same populist, educational instinct into schoolbooks in 1965, when he founded Penguin Education, based separately from Harmondsworth in West Drayton, Middlesex. Over its nine year life, the division produced influential series including Voices and Junior Voices, Connexions, and the Penguin English Project. It also produced Education Specials on controversial subjects, including The Hornsey Affair and Warwick University Ltd, tied to the student unrest of the late 1960s. Following Lane's death and Pearson Longman's takeover, both in 1970, the division stopped publishing schoolbooks and closed in March 1974. More than eighty teachers, journalists, and academics signed a letter to the Times Educational Supplement protesting its closure.

  Wartime paper shortages had already pushed Penguin into magazine publishing, after rationing thinned the review pages of newspapers and forced several literary journals to fold. Penguin New Writing launched in January 1941. Its first issue sold 80,000 copies, dwarfing the 3,500 copies sold by its closest rival, Cyril Connolly's Horizon. Its editor, John Lehmann, introduced British readers to new writers including Lawrence Durrell, Saul Bellow, and James Michie. Declining sales then forced the journal from monthly to quarterly publication. It closed altogether in the autumn of 1950 after 40 issues. Other short lived Penguin periodicals appeared too. Russian Review, Penguin Hansard, and Transatlantic ran during the war, while Penguin Film Review, Penguin Music Magazine, and New Biology followed afterward. As of the 2020s, one Penguin linked publication, The Happy Reader, still circulates in Europe.

  None of this explains how a paperback publisher also came to bankroll multi-volume architectural surveys and illustrated art history. That was a much larger, much riskier undertaking, still to come.

• 7. Scholarly Ventures

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  Nikolaus Pevsner had already pitched a county by county survey of England's buildings to Cambridge University Press and to Routledge before the war. Neither publisher took it on. Only through Penguin did Lane accept a similar proposal. Part of the motive was competition with the Shell Guides edited by John Betjeman, thirteen of which existed by 1939. With Lane's agreement in 1945, Pevsner personally toured English counties, aided by notes from researchers, and the first volume, Cornwall, appeared in 1951. Between then and 1974, Pevsner produced 46 guidebooks in the Buildings of England series, writing 32 alone and ten with assistance. The series ran into commercial trouble as early as 1954 and needed sponsorship, including a grant from the Leverhulme Trust, to continue. It carried on after Pevsner's death in 1983, financed partly by the Pevsner Books Trust and published by Yale University Press. Pevsner's approach favoured architectural history over the antiquarian local detail of older county histories. His volumes said little about monumental brasses, bells, or industrial architecture, an omission critics argue left those subjects undervalued.

  In 1945, Lane also approached Pevsner about a companion series of illustrated art books. Pevsner later recalled the meeting: "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." By 1946, the first contracts were signed. They covered John Summerson's Architecture in Britain, Anthony Blunt's Art and Architecture in France, and Rudolf Wittkower's Italian art and architecture. The first volume actually issued, Ellis Waterhouse's Painting in Britain, 1530-1790, did not appear until 1953. By 1955, Pevsner had drawn up a prospectus planning 47 titles in total. Forty one volumes had appeared by his retirement from editing in 1977, after which Judy Nairn and the medievalist Peter Lasko continued the work. Yale University Press acquired the series in 1992, by which point 45 titles existed; it had published 21 more by 2004, mostly revised editions. Despite a high price for the time, the series was a financial success. Critics noted that seven of its 47 volumes covered English art alone. The Burlington Magazine called English art "a tributary of the main European current."

  Between those two ventures came the King Penguin Books. This was a series of pocket sized illustrated monographs published from 1939 to 1959, modelled on Germany's Insel Bucherei series. They were Penguin's first hardcover volumes and its first to use colour printing. The opening volumes featured sixteen plates each, from John Gould's The Birds of Great Britain and Pierre Joseph Redoute's Roses. Elizabeth Senior edited the series until 1941, when Pevsner took over and stayed until its end. It ran to 76 volumes in total, briefly revived in 1981 for a short series of contemporary fiction.

  Penguin's ambitions were not limited to serious scholarship for adults. From its earliest years, the company had been just as intent on reaching the youngest readers of all.

• 8. Younger Readers and Side Ventures

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  Noel Carrington, an editor at Country Life magazine, first approached Lane in 1938 with an idea for low cost, illustrated non-fiction books for children. Penguin was inspired by the French Editions Pere Castor books and by the autolithography used in contemporary poster art. In 1940, it adopted Carrington's idea as the Puffin Picture Book series. Lane reasoned that children evacuated to the countryside during the war would need books on farming and nature. The first four titles, War on Land, War at Sea, War in the Air, and On the Farm, appeared in December 1940. Paper and staff shortages meant only thirteen titles were issued in the series' first two years, despite Lane's hope for twelve a year. The Picture Books eventually ran to 120 titles and 260 variants. The very last of them, Paxton Chadwick's Life Histories, was issued in 1996 by the Penguin Collectors' Society.

  Eleanor Graham became the first editor of Puffin Story Books, the fiction counterpart, in 1941. She faced resistance from publishers and librarians reluctant to license their children's titles. After Graham retired in 1961, Kaye Webb ran the Puffin list for eighteen years, a period of growing competition in children's publishing. Webb created the Puffin Club in 1967, whose quarterly magazine, Puffin Post, reached 200,000 members at its height. She also brought Arthur Ransome, Roald Dahl, and Ursula K. Le Guin onto the Puffin author list. Tony Lacey succeeded Webb in 1979, at the invitation of Penguin's managing director Peter Mayer, and launched the interactive Fighting Fantasy gamebook series. By 1983, one in three Penguin books sold in Britain was a Puffin.

  In November 1937, Penguin had launched a different kind of series, the Penguin Specials, beginning with Edgar Mowrer's Germany Puts the Clock Back. The Specials aimed to counter what Lane saw as newspaper bias, offering fast turnaround, in depth analysis of current events. The approach answered the popularity of Victor Gollancz's Left Book Club. Genevieve Tabouis's anti-appeasement tract Blackmail or War sold over 200,000 copies. Shiela Grant Duff's Europe and the Czechs reached bookstands on the very day of the Munich agreement and still became a bestseller. Thirty five Specials appeared before the war began. After a gap between 1945 and 1949, the series resumed under editor Tom Maschler, then from 1961 under Tony Godwin. Godwin's "What's Wrong with Britain" run of titles helped fund Richard Hoggart and Stuart Hall's Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at Birmingham University in 1964. The final classic era Special, Keith Thompson's Under Siege: Racism and Violence in Britain Today, appeared in 1988. The format returned in December 2011 as Penguin Shorts, renamed Penguin Specials again in 2012 under an agreement with The Economist.

  Penguin Press, a newer imprint founded by Ann Godoff, began publishing quality nonfiction and literary fiction in 2003. Its titles have since won four National Book Critics Circle awards, one National Book Award, and five Pulitzer Prizes, most recently in 2016. In Australia, the Popular Penguins series launched in 2008, priced at A$9.95, less than half the average paperback price at the time. Its covers were designed to closely match the look of 1940s and 1950s Penguins. One planned title, Noam Chomsky's Hegemony or Survival, had to be dropped after Penguin discovered it no longer held the rights.

  Penguin Books India developed Penguin on Wheels with Satabdi Mishra and Akshaya Rautaray. The idea put the Penguin name on a mobile bookstore, rather than a shop with a fixed address.