Penguin Books 75周年慶/ Penguin Random House

(established 1936) Soon after their launch Penguin books were associated with progressive design trends in 1930s Britain and were often photographed in Modernist interiors or prominently displayed on bookshelves. The company has since become a worldwide publishing success, producing well-designed quality books at affordable prices. The first, distinctively designed, Penguin books appeared in British bookshops in 1935 and within a year had sold more than 3 million copies. Simply and clearly designed by Edward Young, their contents were clearly delineated by the horizontal blocks of colours on the covers with crime demarcated by green, fiction by orange, and blue for biography, and their titles were easily legible through the use of sans serif typefaces. Young also designed the original Penguin symbol. Penguin was established as a separate company in 1936, having been conceived by Allan Lane, a director of The Bodley Head publishers. He had identified a market opportunity in the lack of good quality fiction at affordable prices. Extending the company's range of reading matter, the Pelican imprint was launched to cover contemporary issues in 1937 and included such titles as Anthony Bertram's discursive text Design (1938). After the Second World War the Modernist typographic designer Jan Tschichold was commissioned by Sir Allen Lane to redesign all Penguin Books, resulting in the Penguin Composition Rules (1947). After Tschichold's departure in 1949 his role was taken over by Hans Schleger, underlining the company's commitment to high-quality design in its publications. (Schleger later designed the logo for the Penguin Press hardback initiative of 1967.) Key figures in respect of the pursuit of first-rate design included Abram Games, consultant designer to Penguin Books from 1956 to 1958, and Germano Facetti, art director at Penguin from 1961 to 1972, who was tasked with establishing a policy for cover designs that made the transition from the typographic-centred traditions of Penguin and Pelican to those with a more contemporary appearance. Amongst the many other high-quality designers associated with Penguin have been David Gentleman, whose contributions included the engravings for the New Penguin Shakespeare, and Alan Aldridge, fiction art director from 1963 to 1967, the year in which he, with George Perry, produced The Penguin Book of Comics. There have also been numerous titles whose contents have been concerned with design as much as their visual presence. These included a number of the King Penguin series launched in 1939 under the editorship of Elizabeth Senior and, from 1942, Nikolaus Pevsner. Their titles included English Popular Art by design propagandist Noel Carrington. Notable art and design publishing initiatives included the Planning, Design and Art series, launched in 1942, Penguin Modern Painters, initiated in 1944, and The Things We See, begun in 1947. In 1951 Allen Lane commissioned Pevsner's renowned Buildings of England (later extended to include Scotland, Wales, and Ireland), finishing 46 volumes later in 1974 (the series was sold to Yale University Press in 2001). In 1970 Penguin was acquired by Pearson International, the former taking over a variety of book publishing divisions of other large-scale companies including Frederick Warne in 1983, Michael Joseph (1985), Hamish Hamilton (1985), Dorling Kindersley (2000), and the Rough Guides (2002).