Penguin Books Limited is a British publishing house that was co-founded in 1935 by Allen Lane with his brothers Richard and John. Originally an imprint of publishers The Bodley Head, Penguin became a separate company the following year. Penguin revolutionised publishing in the 1930s with its inexpensive paperbacks, sold through Woolworths and other shops for sixpence, bringing high-quality fiction and non-fiction to the mass market. When the first Penguin paperbacks were launched in 1935, they were priced at just sixpence, the same as a packet of cigarettes, making quality literature affordable to a mass audience. Its success showed that large audiences existed for serious books. It also affected modern British society through its books concerning politics, the arts and science.
Penguin Books is now an imprint of the multinational Penguin Random House, a conglomerate formed in 2013 by its merger with American publisher Random House, a subsidiary of German media conglomerate Bertelsmann. Penguin Group had been wholly-owned by Pearson plc, the British global media company which also owned the Financial Times. When Penguin Random House was formed, Pearson had a 47 per cent stake in the new company, which was reduced to 25 per cent in July 2017. Since April 2020, Penguin Random House has been a wholly-owned subsidiary of Bertelsmann. It is part of the Big Five, a group of the largest English-language publishers, along with Holtzbrinck–Macmillan, Hachette, HarperCollins and Simon & Schuster.
Penguin Books has its registered office in the City of Westminster, London.
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).
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. Penguin 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. Penguin eliminated dust jackets, trimmed margins and replaced sewn bindings with metal staples. Aside from the noticeable deterioration in 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 Army Bureau of Current Affairs (ABCA) and Arts Council of Great Britain (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. 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.