Penguin at 80: How Did It Become Publishing's Odd One Out, and How Will It Find New Readers? | QDaily Business History

Affordable prices and distinctive cover design opened up a vast mass market for Penguin.

“The one mistake Allen Lane (the founder of Penguin Books) ever made was to think of Penguin as something short-lived, something you throw away.”

The speaker is Steve Hare, 63, of Wiltshire, England. His study now holds about 15,000 books published by Penguin, said to be the largest Penguin collection in the world. He is also a director of the Penguin Collectors Society, founded more than forty years ago.

Asked about his first encounter with Penguin, Hare goes back to childhood: he always kept his favorite Puffin book (Penguin's children's imprint) by his pillow so he could leaf through it often. As he grew up, he read his way through the whole Penguin Classics series. “Back then the only thing you could buy, the only thing you could afford, was the Penguin paperback. And the covers were so beautifully and so consistently designed that you couldn't help wanting to line them up. By the time I was fourteen or fifteen, my shelves were already full of Penguins.”

Steve Hare and his study

Penguin has admirers like Steve Hare all over the world. Even if you are not one of them, you have probably heard how it stole the show at the Shanghai Book Fair these past two years, its merchandise selling out fast — people came for that adorable little penguin.

Almost no other publisher has a brand image this strong, or this firmly lodged in people's minds. It has paid off handsomely.

In 1935, Allen Lane pioneered the paperback and cut the price of a book to sixpence, exactly what ten cigarettes cost at the time. Books were no longer something only Europe's rich could afford. They were still well made enough not to feel cheap, and their fresh, distinctive covers were enough to pull people in.

Penguin opened up the mass reading market fast. Over the eighty years since, it has stuck to those founding principles and become a classic British cultural brand.

As Britain's largest book publisher, Penguin holds about 28% of the market. In the United States, it, Random House, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, Hachette and Macmillan together publish two-thirds of the country's books. All of that was before July 2013, when Penguin merged with Random House to create the world's largest publishing house, Penguin Random House — bigger than the other four American publishers combined.

In 2012, the year before the merger, Random House took in €2.142 billion (about £1.555 billion) and Penguin about £1.053 billion. Revenue was not falling, but Penguin had sat at roughly that number for three years running, and Random House's position was no better.

The merger was widely read as an answer to the pressure on traditional publishers, above all from Amazon. By 2011, Amazon was already America's biggest seller of both print books and e-books. As it became the largest book retailer, its conflicts with publishers surfaced and sharpened.

Markus Dohle, CEO of Penguin Random House, says the biggest challenge for publishers is still “discoverability”: “Our goal is to get our books discovered in an environment with fewer and fewer bookstores.”

This year is Penguin's 80th, and its tenth in China. For the first time it has its own stand at the Shanghai Book Fair. “We want to face readers directly, find out what they like, and find our readers,” Jo Lusby, managing director of Penguin Random House North Asia, told QDaily.

Cheap but not shoddy: Penguin was the first to find a vast mass reading market

One day in 1934, on his way home from a visit to the detective novelist Agatha Christie, Allen Lane could not find anything worth reading at the train station. So he decided to start his own publishing house, one that would make books you could buy anywhere — cheap, and reasonably good.

It was a bold idea at the time. Most books in Europe then were handsomely bound, expensive hardbacks costing at least seven or eight shillings each; only the rich dared set foot in a bookshop. Cheap reading matter, meanwhile, was mostly junk.

The middle of that market was what Allen Lane went after. He founded Penguin Books, hired Edward Young as his designer, and carefully designed and published a paperback Penguin series priced at sixpence — exactly the price of ten cigarettes.

On Friday, July 30, 1935, people queued into bookshops, tobacconists and department stores across London and handed over sixpence for a Penguin paperback. At 9:15 that morning, when Allen Lane took the bus to Selfridges and saw the shelves already bare, he knew he had won — though he may not yet have grasped that this was publishing's “paperback revolution.”

Penguin changed the shape of publishing, and it also offended the upper crust, drawing argument from writers and booksellers. George Orwell, who had not yet written 1984, granted that “for sixpence, the Penguins are entirely as good value as one could ask,” but worried that if books got too cheap people would take reading lightly. Stanley Unwin, the furious grandee of the trade, went further: “It would be a tragedy if the public came to think that buying a few sixpenny books counted as supporting literature.”

The British writer Somerset Maugham used the moon as a figure for lofty ideals and sixpence for the ground underfoot. He could never have guessed that sixteen years after The Moon and Sixpence appeared, “sixpence” — that emblem of grubby, ordinary money — would put literature within reach of every Briton.

Leaning on the large middle class of the day, people who wanted to read but could not afford hardbacks, Penguin grew more and more influential. It became their reading guide, and its sales quickly passed those of the hardback houses. For writers, the cheap paperback was also the best way to reach more readers.

During the Second World War, Penguin set up a book club for soldiers who had lost family and friends. The books were small enough to fit in a kit bag and cheap enough that it did not matter if they were ruined, and they became a common companion between marches.

In When Books Went to War, published last year, Molly Guptill Manning describes the American wartime program of “Armed Services Editions.” Under the direction of the U.S. government, publishers including Random House, Doubleday and W. W. Norton formed the Council on Books in Wartime and shipped 1,322 titles — 140 million copies in all — to the front. These special paperbacks were easy to carry and hugely popular with the troops, and a large share of them were serious literature and poetry. The program unexpectedly set off a postwar flood of paperback publishing and raised a generation of American readers.

Penguin had launched paperbacks before the war and done well with them, but Manning argues that the paperback's golden age arrived only afterwards. Penguin did not invent the paperback either. It was simply the first to make a business of it, and the first to find a vast mass reading market.

The first to run its covers as a brand: Penguin is the publisher that markets best

Penguin did not only open up mass reading with the paperback. It also led book design, and led it aggressively. From the 1940s to the 1960s, Penguin Books was all but a synonym for “book design.”

In 1935, Allen Lane hired Edward Young as his designer, and Young produced the classic three-band cover: publisher, title and author, and the Penguin logo. It came with a colour code all its own — orange for fiction, dark blue for autobiography, green for crime, red for drama, and so on. By the 1940s the German designer Jan Tschichold had gone further, setting out a whole family of templates covering typeface, line spacing, margins and more.

Penguin was the first publisher to run its covers as a brand, and the first company to write design rules for a whole series. Looking back over the generations of Penguin Classics covers is a little like reading an art history of the period. The 1950s, for instance, were boom years for printmaking, and you can find plenty of work by the well-known British printmaker John Griffiths on Penguin covers. As public taste shifted, abstract painting, pop-art collage and documentary photography appeared on those famous covers in turn. One classic case is George Orwell's 1984: during the Cold War Penguin gave it a giant eye, while a later edition swapped the image for a row of sewer pipes laid on their sides.

Cover designs from different editions of 1984, George Orwell

For anniversaries and other occasions, Penguin brings in star designers for its commemorative editions. To mark its 70th, it published a set of 70 Pocket Penguins. The designers included Sir Peter Blake, who did album covers for the Beatles, the fashion designer Orla Kiely and the sculptor Antony Gormley. For this year's Little Black Classics, the cover type draws on the faces Penguin Classics once used, and the black-white-black three-band cover is a nod to the first Penguin Classics.

Penguin has also been designing more and more for local markets. Take the Penguin Lives series: Zhao Xuan, editor-in-chief of general books at Penguin Random House China, told QDaily that Penguin worked out the design for the Chinese edition together with designers at SDX Joint Publishing. The look draws on a set of Penguin Shakespeare covers from the 1930s and 1940s, and the publisher brought in printmakers to render figures like Elvis Presley, Marcel Proust and James Joyce. Along the way the designers collected piles of old photographs of each subject at different ages and angles, and picked the one moment that best caught the person to cut into the block.

“I think general books in China used to be sold the way an educational publisher sells books — the classics just sit on the shelf; if you love serious literature you buy them, and if you don't, fine, you don't.” A general publisher is not an educational publisher. People buy books because they like them, and a beautiful cover is a book's best advertisement.

In brand-design terms, Penguin set its own rules early, but the system keeps evolving. You can see brighter colour covers now, with white spines to match, as if it were an app iterating its interface to keep up with the times. As more paperback houses appeared and published more experimental, avant-garde work, Penguin started telling stories.

On the back cover they note who painted the cover illustration, why it was made and why it was chosen for that book. “For our introductions we always go to the best scholars working today. That one essay at the end of the book takes a great deal of work behind it. That is what we rely on to build up more loyal readers,” Zhao Xuan said.

After becoming Penguin Random House...

E-books were talked about as the disruptor a few years ago, and growth is now slowing in the world's two biggest digital markets, the United States and Britain. The latest annual report from the Association of American Publishers shows the e-book share of the market steady at around 21% for two years running.

“That is surprising. We will put more into the mass market and into retail. Our goal is to get our books discovered in an environment with fewer and fewer bookstores. The biggest challenge in publishing is solving discoverability. We want readers to go on loving reading,” said Markus Dohle, CEO of Penguin Random House, calling this the main purpose of the merger of the two giants.

Under Dohle's plan, the innovation happens in three places: retail, consumers and authors. In retail, the job is to help keep physical stores selling (whether that can be done is another question) and to grow digital sales. With consumers, it means talking to them more directly to help readers “discover books.” With authors, changes in book marketing matter enormously; working closely with writers and serving them better is especially important. “We don't want to be bypassed.”

Penguin has always been good at brand marketing, and you can watch it hunting for new methods. On Penguin Books' YouTube channel, a new book trailer has gone up every month since last year. The one posted in September 2014 for Wars of the Roses: Trinity, with sound and plotting that could pass for a professional film trailer, has been watched nearly 200,000 times. The most recent trailer, for the bestselling author Jo Nesbo's thriller Blood on Snow, is animated.

In a few Australian bookshops, a reader who picks up the orange handset on a “Penguin phone box” hears the television personality Safran say hello.

In China, some of what Penguin runs carries a touch of idealism — an illustrated book called Dragon Well Manor (《龙井草堂》) about a garden restaurant in Hangzhou. They thought there was a story there, and spent two years photographing, interviewing and writing it. Experimental projects like this show little sign of commercial calculation, and the choices for the regular series, Penguin Classics and Penguin Lives, are made just as carefully.

So the spread of merchandise at Penguin's Shanghai Book Fair stand makes sense too: mugs, canvas bags, notebooks, suitcases. They still want to work their way into ordinary lives, using this kind of marketing to catch the eye and get where they are going. Jo Lusby said, “A general publisher has to follow its readers closely. A hundred-odd years ago everyone bought those leather-bound hardbacks and put them on the shelf at home; we don't do that now.” “You know, Penguin Classics is the least changing thing we have — it is like a stone lying on a riverbed, it doesn't change, but the water running past it wears it into different shapes.”

“Readers today need reading guidance more than ever. We are not fighting global service providers like Amazon, and we are not fighting new publishing models like self-publishing companies,” Markus Dohle said at last year's Frankfurt Book Fair.

(Graphics: Lin Yuyao)