The Penguin Blog

Scott Free

Penguin recently published a new set of F. Scott Fitzgeralds – beautiful, Art Deco-inspired, foil-decorated hardbacks, designed by Coralie Bickford-Smith. And as it's turned into something of a tradition that when Coralie designs a new set of books we make a blog post about them, we made this video. Really attentive viewers might even spot a chance to win a set of the books...

Great F. Scott from Penguin Books on Vimeo.

I hope you like it, as it was quite traumatic to film.

Here are the books:

And to see the full list, find out more about the books, and buy them all (and why wouldn't you?) just go here.

I think we all realize that it's meaningless to wish good luck to an entire group of people who are in direct competition with each other for a strictly finite reward, and I can only hope that realization doesn't make this sound any less sincere. Good luck to each and every last one of you!

Alan Trotter
Penguin Press Marketing

[UPDATE: The competition's now over, but thank you very much to everyone who entered! The winner has been notified (I'm sure they'll take good care of the books).]

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Prize Draw Terms and Conditions:
1. No purchase necessary to enter the prize draw.
2. This prize draw is open to UK residents aged 14 years or over, with the exception of employees of the Promoter, their families, agents and anyone else connected with this promotion.
3. Entries must be received by 11.59pm GMT on 26 November 2010. The Promoter accepts no responsibility for any entries that are incomplete, illegible, corrupted or fail to reach the Promoter by the relevant closing date for any reason. Entries via agents or third parties are invalid.
4. Only one entry per person. No entrant may win more than one prize.
5. To enter, either post your answer on Twitter, together with the URL http://j.mp/GreatFScott and the hashtag #GreatFScott, or leave a comment with your answer at The Penguin Blog, http://thepenguinblog.typepad.com.
6. All correctly completed entries will be entered into a prize draw which will take place on 29 November 2010. The first entry drawn at random will be the winner.
7. The prize for the winner is a set of six F. Scott Fitzgerald titles: The Great Gatsby, Tender is the Night, This Side of Paradise, The Last Tycoon, The Beautiful and Damned and Flappers and Philosophers.
8. Prizes are subject to availability. In the event of unforeseen circumstances, the Promoter reserves the right (a) to substitute alternative prizes of equivalent or greater value and (b) in exceptional circumstances to amend or foreclose the promotion without notice. No correspondence will be entered into.
9. The winner will be notified via email or post by 3 December 2010. The winner must claim their prize within 14 working days of the Promoter sending notification. If the prize is unclaimed after this time, it will lapse and the Promoter reserves the right to offer the unclaimed prize to a substitute winner selected in accordance with these rules.
10. To obtain details of the winner please email penguinclassics@penguin.co.uk stating the name of the prize draw in the subject heading 4 weeks after the closing date.
11. The Promoter will use any data submitted by entrants only for the purposes of running the prize draw, unless otherwise stated in the entry details. By entering this prize draw, all entrants consent to the use of their personal data by the Promoter for the purposes of the administration of this prize draw and any other purposes to which the entrant has consented.
12. The winners agree to take part in reasonable post event publicity and to the use of their names and photographs in such publicity.
13. By entering the prize draw each entrant agrees to be bound by these terms and conditions.
14. The Promoter is Penguin Books Limited, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL.
15. These terms and conditions are governed in accordance with the laws of England and Wales.

Picture books for the digital generation

Today is an incredibly exciting day. Today is the launch of the Puffin Digital Prize and a brave new world for Puffin picture books. I'm so excited I can hardly breathe. But, I'm getting ahead of myself. Let me take a deep breath and I’ll explain things properly. I'll start at the very beginning . . .

As the Editorial Director of Puffin Picture Books, I am the lucky girl who has the privilege of working on beautifully illustrated, full colour books for young readers. Think Raymond Briggs and The Snowman, add Helen Oxenbury and Julia Donaldson and you get the picture. As I said, I am VERY lucky. But I wasn't feeling quite so lucky a little while ago, when the word digital was a real thorn in my side. How did picture  books fit into this amazing digital world everyone was talking about? Well, quite simply, they didn't. Being full colour with integrated text, the technology simply didn't exist to bring them to life on a digital device. I would enviously look at my fiction colleagues with their e-readers where a whole world of stories lived and breathed in one nifty little machine. Sigh. All I could do was be patient. One day, I said to my beautiful, fully illustrated books, one day, your time will come.

And come it did with a bang - the iPad. Woo-hoo! Like every other person at Penguin, I used all sorts of ruses, good and bad, to get my hands on one. And when I did it felt like Christmas. I've always been a 
book-sniffer (I use that term affectionately, someone who loves a book for being a book as well as a fabulous story) but my conversion was complete in that one moment. Just look at what this thing can do! We have glorious technicolour in fantastic resolution but that's just the beginning. There are interactive games, enhancements, zoom in/zoom out functions, not to mention the wonderful apps where information architects build amazing book experiences at the touch of a screen. (Yes, I know - information architects? I don't know what they do either, it's very technical apparently, but boy am I glad that they are part of my world now!) Now we can read a picture book by flipping through the pages with a swipe or a tap. Talk about a head spin.

There's no doubting that these new platforms will spell out a new world for picture books. They will no longer be bound by the contstraint of 32 pages, it can be what you like. The sky is the limit. But not everything has changed, we are still here to serve our audience of three to six year olds who still love a ripping good yarn, whatever the format.

So, if you think you might be the Eric Carle or Quentin Blake of the digital generation, then we would love to hear from you. The Puffin Digital Prize is open to every writer, illustrator, designer and digital creative, and we’re asking you to create a digital story and win the opportunity to see your book published. We know how much talent is out there and this is your opportunity to showcase it. Find out more at www.puffindigitalprize.co.uk. Good luck!

Louise Bolongaro
Editorial Director, Puffin Picture Books

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Our new 50th anniversary edition of Lady Chatterley's Lover

 

 

In January 1960 the Board of Penguin Books resolved to publish the unexpurgated version of Lady Chatterley's Lover for the first time in Britain. I don't think anyone at the time ever thought this decision would have quite the ramifications both for Penguin and for Britain that it ended up having by the end of the year.  The Crown decided to prosecute Penguin Books in the summer of 1960 and the trial was held over a few days at the end of October and early November.  The not guilty verdict in favour of Penguin was delivered on 2 November 1960 and by the end of the year over 2 million copies of the novel had been sold - with more than 1 million more sold the following year.
 
Our new 50th anniversary edition of Lady Chatterley's Lover contains the complete, unexpurgated text first published by Penguin in November 1960 along with new afterwords by Geoffrey Robertson QC and by Steve Hare, as well as a timeline of the events leading up to and following the trial and publication.  Robertson's piece is a brief, witty and informative essay about the legal implications of the trial setting it in the context of obscenity laws of the time and changes following on from the Chatterley Trial.  Hare's essay, timeline and collection of documents give a more in-depth view of the Trial and how Penguin took the decision to publish and how and with whose help the prosecution was defended.  Aldous Huxley, for example, called it 'an essentially wholesome book' whose 'treatment of sex is at once matter-of-fact and lyrical' in responding to the call to contemporary writers to come to the novel's defence.
 
I hope this new edition not only provides a great deal of context for the novel's original publication and explanation of why the trial and publication were such landmarks, but also encourages readers to (re)discover Lawrence's last novel eighty years after his death, eighty-two years after its composition and fifty years after its first proper UK publication by Penguin Books.

 

Adam Freudenheim
Penguin Classics Publisher

 

To have your say on Lady Chatterley's Lover, visit: www.penguinclassics.co.uk/chatterley

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Remember that by posting a comment you are agreeing to the website Terms of Use. If you consider any content on this site to be inappropriate, please report it to Penguin Books by emailing reportabuse@penguin.co.uk

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