История и эволюция издательства Penguin Books.

British publishing house

Penguin Books is now an imprint of the worldwide Penguin Random House, a conglomerate formed in 2013 by its merger with American publisher Random House, a subsidiary of German media conglomerate Bertelsmann. Formerly, Penguin Group was wholly owned by British Pearson plc, the global media company which also owned the Financial Times. When Penguin Random House was formed, Pearson had a 47% stake in the new company, which was reduced to 25% in July 2017. Since April 2020, Penguin Random House has been a wholly owned subsidiary of Bertelsmann. It is one of the largest English language publishers known as the Big Five, along with Holtzbrinck/Macmillan, Hachette, HarperCollins and Simon & Schuster. Penguin Books has its registered office in the City of Westminster, London, England.

The first Penguin paperbacks were published in 1935, but at first only as an imprint of The Bodley Head 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 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 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 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. 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 an already 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. From the outset, 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 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 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 actively 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, close to Heathrow Airport.

The Second World War saw Penguin emerge as a national institution. Though it had no formal role in the war effort, it was integral to it thanks 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. In the war's six years, it printed some 600 titles and started 19 new series. At a time of enormous increase in the demand for books, Penguin enjoyed a privileged place among its peers. Paper rationing was the besetting problem of publishers in wartime, with the fall of France cutting off supply of esparto grass, one of the constituents of the pulp Penguin used. When rationing was introduced in March 1940, the Ministry of Supply allocated a quota to each publisher as a percentage of the amount that firm used between August 1938 and August 1939. This was particularly advantageous to Penguin, who, as a volume printer, was very successful that year. Further, in a deal with the Canadian Government, Penguin 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 paperbacks' appearance, 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, in 1941 Penguin secured a deal with the War Office, through Bill William's connections with ABCA and CEMA, to supply the troops with books through what was known as the Forces Book Club. Penguin received 60 tons a month from Paper Supply in return for 10 titles a month in runs of 75,000 at 5d. Originally, 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 Royal Mail's free transmission of books to the forces. However, demand exceeded supply on the home front, leading Lane to seek a monopoly on army books made specifically for overseas distribution. Their established paper supply put Penguin in an especially strong position after the war as rationing continued. For this reason, and for the popular prestige the company enjoyed, many of Penguin's competitors had no choice but to concede paperback reprint rights to it. 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. 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 would remain in operation until 2004.) Also in 1986, Penguin purchased American publisher New American Library (NAL) and its hard cover affiliate E. P. Dutton. 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 in order 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 a much publicised 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, 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 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.

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 payments on these royalty free titles were instead invested in commissioning wood 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 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. Rieu said of his work that "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 favourites 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 coloured borders to the front and back covers indicated the original language. The second period of design meant largely black covers with a colour illustration on the front. 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 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 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. 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 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, designed by Claire Mason.

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. Recognising his own 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 specialised 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 a number of 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.

In 1965 Penguin entered the field of educational publishing, Allen Lane's aim being 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.

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 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) were 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 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 nevertheless 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 characterised 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, and 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 made in March of that year. These works 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. Collected columns of cultural critics were also featured.

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 paper and 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, was 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 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 colour 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 commercialisation 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. Complementary to the Puffin Club the Puffin School Book Club, addressed specifically to schools and organisations, grew significantly in this period helping to confirm Puffin market position such that by 1983 one in three Penguin books sold was a Puffin. 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 survey 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 that 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's death 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, and in particular he enlarged the perception of the Victorian achievement in architecture.