Some early Penguin editions (
details)
Penguin Books is a British publisher
founded in 1935 by Allen Lane. Lane's idea was to provide quality writing cheaply, for the
same price as a pack of cigarettes. He also wanted them to be sold not only in bookshops but in railway stations, general stores
and corner shops. Its most emblematic products are its paperbacks. The first Penguin
paperbacks were published in 1935, but at first only as an imprint of Bodley Head with the books originally distributed from a church crypt.
Today Penguin Books is a division of the world-wide Penguin Group and is owned by
Pearson PLC. Its counterpart in the United States is
Penguin Group (USA). Penguin is the lead publisher for the United Kingdom, New Zealand, Australia and India.
History
The publication of literature in paperback, then associated mainly with poor quality, lurid fiction, did not appear viable to
Bodley Head and the deliberately cheap price of 6d. made profitability seem unlikely. This helped
Allen Lane purchase publication rights cheaply for some works, from other publishers
convinced of the short term prospects of the business. The purchase of 63,000 books by Woolworth 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.
From the outset, design was essential to success of the Penguin brand. Eschewing the illustrated gaudiness of other paperback
publishers, Penguin opted for the simple appearance of three horizontal bands, the upper and lower of which were colour 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 Eric Gill's sans
serif and in the upper band was a cartouche with the legend "Penguin Books". The inital
design was created by the then twenty-one-year-old office junior Edward Young, who also drew the first version of the Penguin
logo.
The colour schemes included: orange and white for general fiction, green and white for crime fiction, red and white for travel
and adventure, blue and white for biographies; 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.
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. The war years continued the company's success with a healthy sales of titles, meaning that Penguin suffered less from
the paper rationing which afflicted other publishers. Aircraft
Recognition by Saville-Sneath, RA, was a best seller. 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 Swiss 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 then fledgling Pan
Books.
By 1960, a number of forces were in play which were to shape 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 advisor, 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, who was to decisively alter the
appearance of the Penguin brand. Beginning with the crime series, Facetti canvassed the opinion of a number of designers
including Romek Marber for a new look to 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 bars design 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, giving 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.
By the end of the 1960s, Penguin was in financial trouble. Ultimately, the company was bought out by Pearson Longman on 21 August 1970, some six
weeks after the death of Allen Lane. 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.
Just as Lane well 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 Britain and the predicted obscenity trial not only marked Penguin as a fearless publisher, 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
Britain, although censorship of the written word was only finally defeated after the Inside Linda Lovelace trial of 1978.
Other controversial titles published by Penguin include Spycatcher and
The Satanic Verses. In the same tradition of courting controversy, Penguin
published Deborah Lipstadt's book Denying the Holocaust which accused David Irving
of Holocaust denial. Irving sued Lipstadt and Penguin for libel in 1998 but lost in a
widely publicized trial.
First titles
The first twenty books published by Penguin under the Bodley Head imprint were:[citation needed]
A penguin relaxing and reading a good book
Penguin Classics
Penguin Classics editions
The imprint publishes hundreds of classics from the Greeks and Romans to Victorian Literature to modern classics. Originally,
red and yellow marks on the spines of the books determined type. In 2002, Penguin announced it was redesigning its entire
catalogue, 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 existing silver covers for the latter have so far been retained for most of the
titles.
The redesign – featuring a colourful painting on the cover, with 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 yellow and brown within a couple of
years.[1]
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). Prior to 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 closed in 2003 as part of the
production costs rationalisation of the Classics list, and any design work is now done by editors and outside suppliers.
Imprints
Penguin Press
Penguin General
Children's
ePenguin
Trademark disputes
Penguin Books has been in some disputes over names and trademarks. In 1986, it pushed Penguin Software to give up its name. More recently, it published a book katie.com which caused problems for the unrelated user of that domain, and then tried to acquire the
domain.
See also
Further reading
- Penguin Books, Fifty Penguin Years 1985. ISBN 0-14-008589-0
- Phil Baines, Penguin by Design: A Cover Story 1935-2005 2005. ISBN 0-7139-9839-3
- Gerald Cinnamon, "Hans Schmoller, Typographer", The Monotype Recorder (New Series), 6
April 1987)
- Jeremy Lewis, Life and Times of Allen Lane (Penguin Special) 2005. ISBN 0-670-91485-1
- Tim Graham, Penguin in Print - A Bibliography, 2003. Penguin Collector's Society.
External links
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