34 Facts About Penguin Books

Penguin Books revolutionised publishing in the 1930s through its inexpensive paperbacks, sold through Woolworths and other high street stores for sixpence, bringing high-quality fiction and non-fiction to the mass market.

Penguin Books is 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 Books Group was wholly owned by British Pearson plc, the global media company which owned the Financial Times.

Penguin Books has its registered office in the City of Westminster, London, England.

Only paperback editions were published until the King Penguin Books 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.

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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.

In 1937, Penguin Books's headquarters were established at Harmondsworth, close to Heathrow Airport.

Further, in a deal with the Canadian Government, Penguin Books agreed to exclusively publish editions for their armed forces, for which they were paid in tons of paper.

Consequently Penguin Books eliminated dust jackets, trimmed margins and replaced sewn bindings with metal staples.

Penguin Books received 60 tons a month from Paper Supply in return for 10 titles a month in runs of 75, 000 at 5d.

On 20 April 1961, Penguin Books 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.

In 1985, Penguin Books purchased British hardback publisher Michael Joseph and in 1986, Hamish Hamilton.

Penguin Books 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 Books published Deborah Lipstadt's book Denying the Holocaust, which accused David Irving of Holocaust denial.

In 2006, Penguin Books attempted to involve the public in collaboratively writing a novel on a wiki platform.

Since Plato and Aristotle are the most read philosophers in the world today, and since some of these Penguin Books translations are favourites among professional philosophers in several countries, this amounts to a minor crisis in the history of philosophy.

In 2002, Penguin Books announced it was redesigning its entire catalogue, merging the original Classics list with what had been the old Penguin Books Twentieth-Century Classics list, though the silver covers for the latter have so far been retained for most of the titles.

In 1940, the children's imprint Puffin Penguin 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.

Pelican Penguin 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 Books entered the field of educational publishing, Allen Lane's aim being to carry the radical and populist spirit of Pelicans into the schoolbook market.

Penguin Books Education 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.

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.

Thirty-five Penguin Books Specials were published before the outbreak of war, including two novels Hasek'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.

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.

In December 2011, Penguin Books launched nine titles as 'Penguin Books Shorts' which featured the iconic tri-band covers.

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In 2012 they became known as Penguin Books Specials following an agreement with The Economist made in March of that year.

Subsequent Penguin Books 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.

Tony Lacey took over Webb's editorial chair in 1979 at the invitation of Penguin Books managing director Peter Mayer when Puffin was one of the few profitable divisions of the beleaguered company.

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.

Wartime paper rationing, which had resulted in a generous allocation to Penguin Books, 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 left a gap in the magazine market that Lane hoped to fill.

In January 1941 the first issue of Penguin Books 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.

King Penguin Books was a series of pocket-sized monographs published by Penguin Books between 1939 and 1959.

King Penguin Books imprint was briefly revived in 1981 for a series of contemporary works, chiefly fiction.

Penguin Books's work was continued by Judy Nairn and the medievalist Peter Lasko.