The story
Founded by Allen Lane in 1935, in London.1
Origins
The first Penguin paperbacks were published in 1935, at first as an imprint of The Bodley Head (of Vigo Street, London) with the books originally distributed from the crypt of Holy Trinity Church Marylebone.
Anecdotally, Lane recounted that his experience with the poor quality of reading material on offer at Exeter St Davids railway station inspired him to create cheap, well designed quality books for the mass market. The question of how publishers could reach a larger public had been the subject of a conference at Rippon Hall, Oxford, in 1934 which Lane had attended. Though the publication of literature in paperback was then associated mainly with pulp fiction, the Penguin brand owed something to the short-lived Albatross imprint of British and American reprints that briefly traded in 1932. When Lane expressed a desire for a "dignified but flippant" mascot; his secretary, Joan Coles, suggested the penguin. The Lane brothers (Allen, Dick and John) then agreed to name the publisher Penguin Books.
Inexpensive paperbacks did not initially appear viable to Bodley Head, since the deliberately low price of 6d. made profitability seem unlikely. This helped Lane purchase publication rights for some works more cheaply than he otherwise might have, since publishers were convinced of the business's short-term prospects. In the face of resistance from the traditional book trade, it was the purchase of 63,000 books by Woolworths 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.
Only paperback editions were published until the King Penguin series debuted in 1939 and latterly the Pelican History of Art was undertaken; these works, considered unsuitable as paperbacks because of their lengths and copious illustrations on art paper, were cloth-bound.
Penguin Books Inc was incorporated in 1939 to satisfy US copyright law; and, despite being a late entrant into a well established paperback market, enjoyed further success under vice president Kurt Enoch with such titles as What Plane Is That and The New Soldier Handbook. The company's expansion saw the hiring of Eunice Frost—first as a secretary, then as an editor, and ultimately as a director, who was to have a pivotal influence in shaping the company. In 1945 she was entrusted with the reconstruction of Penguin Inc after the departure of its first managing director, Ian Ballantine.
Design was essential to Penguin's success. Avoiding 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 the series to which the title belonged; this is sometimes referred to as the horizontal grid. In the central white panel, the author and title were printed in Gill Sans, and in the upper band was a cartouche with the legend "Penguin Books". The initial design was created by the 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 colour 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 resisted the introduction of cover images for several years. Some recent publications of literature from that time have duplicated the original look. In 1937, Penguin's headquarters were established at Harmondsworth, Middlesex (now part of Greater London).
Post-war history
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 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 fledgeling Pan Books. Many other series were published such as the Buildings of England, the Pelican History of Art and Penguin Education.
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In 1949, Harry F. Paroissien (who had been Sir Allen Lane's deputy) was sent by him to the United States to set up Penguin Books in Baltimore, Maryland.
By 1960, a number of forces 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 and 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, who was to decisively alter the appearance of Penguins. 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 began the treatment across the Penguin line starting with crime, the orange fiction series, then Pelicans, Penguin Modern Classics, Penguin Specials, and Penguin Classics, giving a 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 series published in total.
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 unpublished in the United Kingdom and the predicted obscenity trial, R v Penguin Books Ltd, 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 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 1970, 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. Penguin merged with long-established U.S. publisher Viking Press in 1975.
The first Penguin Bookshop opened in Covent Garden in 1980. In 1985, Penguin purchased British hardback publisher Michael Joseph and in 1986, Hamish Hamilton. After these acquisitions, Penguin moved its offices to central London (27 Wrights Lane, W8 5TZ). Thus 'Harmondsworth' disappeared as the place of publication after half a century. (The warehouse at Harmondsworth remained in operation until 2004.)
Penguin purchased American publisher New American Library (NAL) and its hard-cover affiliate E. P. Dutton also in 1986. New American Library had originally been Penguin U.S.A. and 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, which accused David Irving of Holocaust denial. Irving sued Lipstadt and Penguin for libel in 1998 but lost in the much publicised Irving v Penguin Books and Lipstadt. 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, leading 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 tried 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 railway station in May 2017 to mark Lane's significant contribution to the publishing industry.
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 Rudolf 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 totalling 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 Judy Nairn (his editorial assistant on the Buildings of England) 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. New volumes continue to be produced in the 2010s, and new editions of older ones.
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 criticised from within the academy for its evident biases. Many of its authors were German émigrés, consequently there was a methodological preference for the kunstwissenschaft 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.
From Wikipedia’s article on Penguin Books, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.5