The Penguin Blog

Happy Birthday Penguin!

We’ve been celebrating all year, but today is in fact our official birthday. So a very Happy 75th Birthday to us! We've partied like it's 1999, but we've also managed to do a lot of fun work around our 75th, as well as continuing to publish many great books that we're tremendously proud of.

As part of our celebrations, we’ve interviewed our Editors talking about life at Penguin Books; they’ve responded to questions from our Twitter followers, they’ve talked about some of the highlights of their careers, and they’ve also given us sneak previews of the books they're most excited about.

Publishing the beautiful Penguin Decades series has been the main 75th event of the year. The novels were picked for how they helped define the decades from the 50s through to the 80s and feature cover art by Peter Blake, Allen Jones, Zandra Rhodes and John Squire.

Penguin Decades bring you the novels that helped shape modern Britain. When they were published, some were bestsellers, some were considered scandalous, and others were simply misunderstood. All represent their time and helped define their generation, while today each is considered a landmark work of storytelling.

And here are some of the bespoke 75th products we’ve made: 

   

We have also been running 75th competitions all year [you can still enter!], celebrating some of our most beautiful, best-selling and award-winning books. The prize for the winner is to win all the books that we’ve featured in these competitions throughout the year.

'Cold Comfort Farm - amazingly funny and sweet, yet in many ways startlingly relevant, despite the obvious 'old-fashioned' aspects.'
Susanna, Leamington Spa

'I would pass on Peter Pan as my mum used to read Peter Pan to me when I was a child and the magical story still has a special place in my heart.'
Caroline, Carnwell

'Jamie's Ministry of Food! I know its not traditional or any sort of classic read but it has such amazing recpies I think they should be passed on for generations to come!'
Claire, Sheffield

'A Christmas Carol as it shows how we lived in those times but could still give the same heart-warming message to any generation.'
Gary, Dicot

'Orwell's 1984 is the no-brainer.'
James, Kingston Upon Thames

'The Spy by Clive Cussler - there is no one to beat him for sheer adventure - real page turner.'
Christina, King's Lynn

'Wuthering Heights because it will always be a classic and it taught me the value of love and the fierce passion related to it. I feel everyone should read this book because it opens your eyes to the past and present.'
Lucy, Lincoln

'White Teeth was a really affecting book and totally relevant to the modern age -- more people need to read it, so I'd happily pass it on to the next generation for them to see how things used to be.'
Jennifer, Paisley

'Is it going to be the generation of the e-reader, I think not. There is nothing to beat cuddling up with a good book in traditional format & this is why I would pass on ALL my Penguin books to my grandchildren in hopes they would enjoy them as much as me.'
Jennie, Portsmouth

You can find out more about Penguin’s 75th at: www.penguinis75.co.uk.

We’ve also been celebrating Puffin’s 70th Birthday, and you can join that party here: www.happybirthdaypuffin.co.uk

Chris Croissant
Marketing Assistant, Penguin Digital

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The Joys of Cycling a Bike in London

Last night I had the pleasure of attending the launch party for Robert Penn’s timely new book It’s All About the Bike at Rapha Cycle Club. It was a fantastic evening, with the Penguin staff arriving en masse on their bikes, a warm welcome from his editor Helen Conford and a hilarious speech from Robert Penn full of great anecdotes and romantic memories of writing the book; touring the world to design and build his dream bike.

Living in London for a year, meeting an author like Robert Penn 6 months prior to publication of his book, and having an old rusty road bike that was much in need of a service convinced me of one thing: it was time to do up my bike.

I should probably make it very clear from the start that I sit firmly in the single-speed camp when it comes to cycling in London. I gave it a 2 week trial, and having not once changed gear throughout the course of my various cycling expeditions, I decided single-speed was the way to go.

Having just read the manuscript for Robert Penn’s It’s All About the Bike and living with a housemate who had become strangely obsessed with doing his own bike up [reading such blogs as: http://www.sheldonbrown.com/] the enthusiasm was infectious and it wasn’t long until I was eyeing up various styles and colours cycling past me as I sat glumly on the bus or stepped out of a stuffy tube station.

Now not knowing very much about bikes, and believing in fashion before function, I knew my main interest was going to be in the aesthetics of the bike. I could give you arguments about the lighter weight of the frame with losing the gear cogs, streamlining with losing the wires and back brakes, the greater chain-tension allowing you to pull off faster from numerous traffic lights… but the reality is I simply wanted to strip my bike down, keep the lines clean and be the envy of various Shoreditch-types.

Fortunately, I had a strong Dawes steel frame as a starting point and felt that although I would miss the purple and turquoise colour scheme and the old-and-rusty-but-still-pretty-cool statement it was making; it was time to freshen it up, clean off the rust and give it a new lease of life.

So with the help of my housemate I began stripping my bike down, getting rid of all the excess baggage and opting for the bear minimum: one front brake (just lean back) and a single speed gear cog. We found a good and cheap place  to get the frames sandblasted and powder-coated from this bike blog: http://www.lfgss.com/  Just before going on holiday to Berlin, we cycled up to some in-the-middle-of-nowhere factory in Hackney, dismantled the bikes and kindly asked if they would mind knocking the pedals/cranks out for us, because it was something we had no idea how to do.

Returning from a city where bikes are everywhere and where it is possibly the friendliest and safest place to cycle in Europe, I came home to a glorious racing green frame and quickly went about ordering some new wheels and with the help of Penn’s chapter and advice on The Saddle, got a great second-hand Brookes saddle from eBay.

Image: Perfect balance, classic style, great colour (the bike)
                

The whole process took quite a few weekday evenings with a few Red Stripes, cost about £200 and was ultimately worth it because I made the money back from the tube within 2 months, can now cycle all over London very rarely having to face the general public in confined spaces, and have a bike that is beautiful and that I love.

*It's All About the Bike publishes 29th July 2010

Chris Croissant
Marketing Assistant, Penguin Digital

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Our Kind of Writer

Today we are publishing a novel written by a bright young thing and everyone here at Penguin is very excited. You see, every now and then in this publishing racket you get hold of a novel that really shakes you to your very core. It’s a rare, exhilarating experience, and one made all the more startling when you realise the author was barely older than you are when he wrote it and apparently wrote the thing in only five weeks.

The author in question? A publisher’s dream. Under thirty-five, incredibly talented, handsome and charismatic and with what some like to call a very promotable personal story. So who the hell am I talking about, I hear you type? Well, the author is a man called John le Carré and the novel ‘The Spy Who Came in from the Cold’ was published in 1963 when he was only thirty two.

Now, I’m not too proud to admit that until recently a “le Carré” was something I’d watch, not something I’d read. As regulars to these missives on here will have probably realised, I’m quite picky about what makes it on to my to-read pile and I have to say that I could count the number of crime/thrillers/espionage books I’ve read on one hand. But I was wrong, and thankfully the prize for my ignorance is being able to discover and read for the first time one of the most thrilling and engaging writers working today.

First published 47 years ago, and being reissued today in Penguin Modern Classics, le Carré’s ‘Spy’ still has the power to make you uncomfortably aware of the mechanics operating in the pit of your stomach. His relentless, unflinching and unforgiving vision of the world reminded me of the moral wasteland that permeates McCarthy’s scalpathon ‘Blood Meridian’ and leaves you with an overwhelming sense that no matter how good the good guys are; the bad guys will always win.

Fast forward 47 years and 19 novels later, and le Carré set to publish his new novel, ‘Our Kind of Traitor’, in September. While ‘Spy’ was absolutely of its time, painfully relevant to the Cold War world it so expertly describes, ‘Our Kind of Traitor’ is a novel for now, for today and le Carré tackles the City of London’s unholy alliance with Britain’s Intelligence Establishment with aplomb. This was the first le Carré I read, and I loved it. As he leads you down the rabbit hole of intrigue and espionage, seamlessly gliding through the heads of his characters, offering a hint of information here, a glimmer of understanding there, you cannot help but feel under the control of a complete master.

So, if you are life long fan, like an awful lot of people are, then you are in for a real treat. If you are a novice, an ignoramus, like me, then what are you waiting for? You have 21 novels to catch up with before the launch of ‘Our Kind of Traitor’ on September 16th.

Matt Clacher
Marketing Executive

@mattclaher

They Do Things Differently Over There; or, A Pictorial Tour of New York’s Bookshops

Contrary to how this may look, my recent visit to New York wasn’t work-oriented; I do just like to spend time in bookshops. But I’d guess a fair few people who visit this site and read this blog like doing the same so I refuse to apologise for how I like to spend my time on holiday.

While there, I met our author Joshua Ferris for lunch and he talked about how he was struck by the difference between UK and US bookshops. He said he’d recognise around 95% of the names on a New York bookshop’s shelves whereas in London it was closer to 20% and he thought it was interesting that at the point where our cultures in theory meet, over language, the contrast seems most marked. I thought therefore it might be nice to share some of the pictures I (actually, my girlfriend) took while there, and talk a bit about what I observed and enjoyed.

This is a little rare books bookshop on 8th Avenue, in the West Village. You can probably guess their  sensibilities from the name. I found a signed, first edition of Tobias Wolff’s In Pharoah’s Army that, at $35 dollars, I really considered but didn't buy in the end, becuase I'd just spent a load of money on posh chocolate, which I promptly left behind somewhere, catastrophically. So if anyone came across a bag of fancy chocolate bars somewhere around the West Village that day, I HOPE YOU ENJOYED THEM.

Here’s the window of Left Bank Books. Some real goodies there. I love the cover of that first edition of Ariel by Plath and The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing.

This is McNally Jackson, recommended to us by the writer Stuart Evers, and their brilliant and generous window display for The New Yorker’s recent ‘20 under 40’ list – ‘Twenty young writers who capture the inventiveness and the vitality of contemporary American fiction’. 10 years ago they did the same and it featured now-familiar names such as Michael Chabon, Junot Diaz and David Foster Wallace, so fairly esteemed company for this new generation. We’re pleased to have three writers on this list: Jonathan Safran Foer and Joshua Ferris, whose new books, Eating Animals and The Unnamed, respectively, have just come out, and Nicole Krauss, whose novel The History of Love was a big success a while back and whose next, Great House, is out early next year and that we’re already pretty excited about.

But enough plugs (for now): they really seemed to know their New York audience, with big displays of new literary fiction, a large ‘staff favourites’ table at the front and, wonderfully for our walk-weary legs, lots of chairs and a relaxed, small café where you could peruse the wares at your leisure.

McNally Jackson were also holding a reading with Shane Jones for his book Light Boxes, which has just been published by our Hamish Hamilton imprint. This is a great success story: originally published by the tiny Publishing Genius press, film rights were bought by Spike Jonze and second publishing rights (I guess, in old-fashioned terms, paperback rights) were bought globally by Penguin. We met Adam Robinson the (one and only) guy who does Publishing Genius and he’s a great fellow, a real inspiration. He set the company up with no publishing experience, just a desire to work with great writers on books he enjoys. He funded it all himself and did an incredible job of getting Shane’s book noticed originally. The whole thing has raised his company’s profile hugely and he’s currently working to publish a book of short stories that, in his own words, ‘Is totally amazing’. I’ll be looking out for that. In fact, he promised to send me one, and I think he’s a man of his word. He also had an awesome beard. There was definite beard-envy.

Ok, it’s not a bookshop, but this is the area Dumbo, where Melville House Publishing are based, working out of their bookshop (just out fo shot in this picture). That’s the Manhattan Bridge in the foreground and the Brooklyn Bridge in the background; pret-ty cool place to work.

And here’s……the Melville House Bookshop. They sell their own books, of which they have many in varying categories. I bought a book by Frank O’Connor, one of the greatest short story writers in any language, ever. It’s a long non-fiction piece on the art of the short story. I was surprised to see that they are the US publishers of Hans Fallada, whose re-discovered novel Alone in Berlin Penguin does in the UK and that’s been riding high in the bestseller lists. It’s been doing similar things in the States, where it’s called Every Man Dies Alone, and I think it’s heartening that a relatively small house like Melville actually re-discovered this forgotten talent and have made it into something big.

There was no way we couldn’t get a photo of these bad boys: Melville House’s ‘Art of the Novella’ series. With little prompting I could have bought each and every one of these designer beauties. Nothing else to say: just look and drool…

Here’s yours truly looking at a shiny black and gold book cover in BookCourt on Court St in Brooklyn. We just happened upon this one and were very impressed that they were getting Bret Easton Ellis in to read … but on the day we were leaving! Boo! According to Josh Ferris they’d had Don DeLillo in a couple of weeks before: double-boo!

A lot of the indie bookshops in New York are great supporters of small, often local, presses. Here’s a sign in BookCourt explaining Ugly Ducking Presse, a not-for-profit outfit based in Brooklyn…                                                        

…and here’s the space given over to their books:

Last but not least, I couldn’t not mention Literary Death Match. Hosted by the venerable Todd Zuniga, it pits four writers against each other in a fight to the end of the night, if not actually death. They’re judged on literary merit, performance and intangibles. The pic shows the poet Rives using his iPad to beat-box along with his own hand, if that makes any sense at all.

I was gobsmacked when he didn’t win – didn’t even make it through to the second round! Cries, in British accents, of ‘He wuz robbed!’ were reported… As well as New York, LDM happens in London and Paris (and maybe other palces) and is worth more than one visit.

It’s a fallacy that everyone in America sits around reading journals of short stories or experimental poetry all the time, of course. It’s also the case that the New York literary – and even publishing – scene is probably very different from a lot of other parts of America. But as someone who loves fiction and non-fiction in their various forms I found it a massively exciting and interesting place to be, with bookshops to match.

Anyone else have any New York literary memories they'd care to share? Did I miss anything that I'll have to go back to see? 

Joe Pickering

Publicity

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Long Books and the Curse of the Thick Spine

My job, as 50% of the Penguin General marketing department, is simple: get people to read our books. I try to achieve this in many different ways, whether an everyday conversation with another colleague or a national advertising campaign, my aim is always to communicate a very simple message: read this. It’s a gratifying job when everything works, but if there is one thing, more than any other, which often gets in the way, it’s the page count. Quality, by the time a book gets to me is not an issue, but if that book is over 450 pages long, the answer to my enthusiastic “so have you read that amazing book I was telling you about?” is usually, always, “no, not yet, I want to, it’s just that it’s soooo long”.

Bizarrely, this doesn’t seem to be a concern of people on the outside of this particular office. The two runaway, undisputable mega success stories of recent years are Stephenie Meyer’s ‘Twilight Saga’ and Stieg Larsson’s ‘Millennium Trilogy’. Starting with Meyer, the four books that make up this series have sold a staggering 6,908,573 copies in the UK combined. Wow. These aren’t short books: 'Twilight' (464pp), 'New Moon' (497pp), 'Eclipse' (576pp), and 'Breaking Dawn' (720pp). Length obviously isn’t an issue for fans of Bella and Edward. Now let’s look at Stieg, with sales for his trilogy clocking in at more modest, but still respectable, 2,729,821. These aren’t short books either: 'The Girl with Dragon Tattoo' (542pp), 'The Girl who Played with Fire' (608pp), and 'The Girl who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest' (656pp).

So, this little bit of cod research tells us that people don’t mind long books, or, put another way, they don’t find length inherently off-putting. The seven books mentioned above are obviously very commercial propositions; immensely readable with g-force plots. However, why do people sometimes assume that the same will not be true for more, dare I say, literary reads? Does length in commercial fiction equate positively in the mind to ‘more story’, while the literati will look at a lengthy book and just see ‘more difficult’? ‘Tome’, I suppose, does sound rather deathly.

Personally, I‘m seldom dissuaded by length. My favourite book of all time is long, fiendishly so. At 1104 pages and with eye-squintingly small type, I can see why some might find ‘Infinite Jest’ a little daunting. Maybe. And one of the best books of this year is long. Paul Murray’s hilarious-while-utterly-heartbreaking 'Skippy Dies' comes in at 664 pages. Even the best book I read last year was long, Roberto Bolano’s insane '2666' (912pp). You see the thing about a good book is that when they are really (can’t stop reading chunks aloud to your friends) good, they are never quite long enough. 

In around about way then, we are publishing two books this summer that are long. Off-puttingly long in the minds of some unnamed colleagues here (you know who you are). Julie Orringer’s sweeping epic ‘The Invisible Bridge’, is a whopping 604 pages and James Robertson’s panoramic ‘And the Land Lay Still’ isn’t so trim either at 674 pages. These are great books. Truly remarkable achievements and utterly worth every second they take to devour. So if you see them on the shelf, pick them up, have a read and be rewarded by the rich, enveloping experience that only great, big, fat, long books can offer.

Matt Clacher
Marketing Executive
@mattclacher

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Keith Haring's Journals

Alexis Kirschbaum, Editorial Director, on an iconoclastic twentieth century artist, and why he's a better fit for Penguin Classics than you might imagine. 

Keith Haring was one of America’s most influential artists in the wake of Pop, famous for bringing street art into the gallery, and gallery art into the streets and subways of New York. This month we are very pleased to add his Journals to our Modern Classics list. They are the mirror of an extraordinary life, recounting his early days in art school, his thoughts on the nature of art and creativity, the corrosiveness of fame, and the idea of a painting as a visual poem (complete with hieroglyphs and pictograms). In them he developed his own philosophy of art, and his commitment to populism can be found throughout his journal, expressed in his characteristic sloganeering: ‘The public has a right to art!’ ‘Art is for everybody!’

All this may seem a world away from Penguin Classics. But is it? Allen Lane was committed to the democratic availability of great literature and translations when he started Penguin Classics, believing that literature, in first-rate editions, should not be the preserve of a few but an affordable opportunity for many.

At Penguin we continue to devote ourselves to Allen Lane’s ideals. This means not only producing excellent editions at affordable prices, but also finding ways to present the classics to a new readership and to make links between contemporary tastes and the art of the past. Central to this is the design of the books, which has always been central to Penguin Classics. 

To this end, we have recently begun to commission major contemporary artists to create new covers for some of our classics, to refresh and modernize great literature. Among the first of these collaborations have been Damien Hirst and Origin of the Species, Cy Twombly and Virgil’s Georgics, Anselm Keifer and Letters to a Young Poet, Yayoi Kusama and Alice in Wonderland (forthcoming), and Harland Miller and Edgar Allan Poe.

Classics sometimes have an undeservedly stuffy reputation. But one of the things we want to remind people of with these collaborations is that Penguin Classics is a collection of history’s most culturally radical books. Contemporary art helps us modernize Penguin Classics visually, in a way that reminds people that every classic began as a revolutionary work of art. 

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