New Kid on the Block

I’m only just recovering from shock; the variety that hits new graduates when they leave the cosy world of uni and join the commuter traffic of work-going people. Oh God! I’ve never been up as early, on every single day of the week, than I have been during my time here at Penguin. Just when the internship ended, and I was looking forward to my usual late nights and even later mornings, they went and offered me a job! Cue the sympathetic murmurs…

So here I am, post graduation, living my nerdy little dream, so far so good. When people ask ‘So what’re you doing now,’ I go ‘Oh, you know, the usual, work,’ and they go ‘Really, where,’ and I go ‘Penguin!’ Smug? Me? Surely not!

It’s been an amazing time though. No two days are exactly the same, which is great. One day, I’m out on errands in Covent Garden, looking for cool things to put in our Great Big Glorious Book for Girls stand, and the next, I’m cavorting in the Bethnal Green Working Men’s Club at the launch of Hari Kunzru’s new book, My Revolutions, which by the way, is very good, as is Moshin Hamid’s Booker-shortlisted The Reluctant Fundamentalist.

And even though I don’t think I’ll ever get over snatching a mere 8 hours of sleep a day, working here is well worth the sacrifice!

Minjiba,
New Kid on the Block

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Comments

[Dean]

Once upon a time Penguin had cachet but corporate greed ensures it is staying in one place. Managers call it 'maximising the value of the brand' but I call it exploiting the work of their predecessors. They also talk about 'responding to customer needs' which, when you think of the history of the company, is a nonsense. The question you need to ask is: how to make high culture sexy?

A disclaimer: I am a 45-year-old Arts graduate (currently completing a postgrad program at my alma mater).

So my tastes are not identical to those of (as we say in this country) 'your average punter'.

Who was it said "the enthusiasms of the elite in one age become the commonplaces of the next"?

Tennyson? Keats? Cowper? Pope? Dryden? Milton? Donne? Willie?

[Colbot]

Dean - I have a better question: are you a pillock or what?

If you had done even the slightest bit of reading about Penguin's history - try Wikipedia for starters, you can't get more commonplace than that - you'd notice that Penguin's original purpose was to provide quality reading at affordable prices. Oh and it was set up as a company, not a public service: i.e. Allen Lane wanted to make money out of people's desire to own good books.

Penguins proved popular with everyone not just 'your average punter' - whoever that might be - and even with grumpy, middle-aged students then, as well as now.

Is the desire to make a living in books just corporate greed? Surely sexy is all in the eye of the beholder? Does a forty-five-year-old student really need his 'high culture' to be 'sexy'? Surely 'high culture' - whatever that is: something difficult?, something not for everyone?, something better than everything else? - is only for the 'elite' anyway, who would find 'sexy' vulgar?

Which brings me back to the original purpose of Penguin - it was most definitely NOT to sell books only to a snobbish, name-dropping, self-styled elite who believed that they alone were the arbiters of taste and decency.

Allen Lane was no intellectual, he was a businessman - and a pretty shrewd one. He had a good idea: making books commonplace by making them affordable and widely available. Above all, he helped us get away from the idea that books of any kind were only for an elite.

Dean - welcome to the modern age.

[Dean]

Colbot, you are drab and intellectually commonplace. You wouldn't understand my meaning if it hit you in the face. As to the 'modern age', you drip, I think you are yet to glimpse the vistas visible to me.

Publishing is about adventure and excitement, not living off reprints of Jane Austen.

Surely Penguin has the intellectual resources to come up with a marketing plan to sell other books published in, say, the 18th century. How about a Defoe retrospective? Reprints of The Spectator, with an academic's intro? A Dr Johnson special edition, with pieces from The Idler?

Since I cannot find 'pillock' in my dictionary, I assume it means 'fantastically gifted and elementally unique'.

Thanks!

[Marija]

Oh, just hang in there and try to organise your time wisely, not loosing it on silly stuff that just eat up our time. (I am kinda jelaous since I adore Penguin and its editions) :DD
Good luck!

[Kitty]

Dean, Dean, Dean... It's not publishing that's about adventure and excitement, as you say in your post. It's READING that's about adventure and excitement and, for many readers, Jane Austen novels still provide just that.

With an attitude like yours one can only assume you've never worked in publishing. If you had, you might understand the fragile financial structure of any major publishing company: that is, the way in which solid backlist titles like any Jane Austen provide significant revenue, allowing risks to be taken on other exciting books.

I can't even begin to list some of the amazing books that have come out of Penguin and many other commercial publishers in the last few years. You should stop reading Pope and start buying books, Dean.

[Dean]

Kitty I worked in publishing for a year but left to pursue other things. I made my first magazine on a Mac Classic in 1988 and have done corporate communications, marketing publications, technical writing and most recently technical communications.

I've been making deliverables for longer than I care to think. The publishing industry if it wants to prosper has a unique opportunity in this postmodern age.

But despite the fact that I know more about Jane Austen than most people know about their wives (I think the word she would prefer in this case is 'esteem') I do not like to be offered, again, every f***king year, another, rebadged omnibus Jane.

Who was her favourite novelist? Her favourite poet? What books did she read as a teenager?

Unlike most people, I care.