Penguin Books is a publisher founded in 1935 by Sir Allen Lane. Penguin revolutionised publishing in the 1930s through its high quality, inexpensive paperbacks, sold through Woolworths and other high street stores for sixpence. Penguin's success demonstrated that large audiences existed for serious books. Penguin also had a significant impact on public debate in Britain, through its books on politics, the arts, and science.
Penguin Books is now the flagship imprint of the worldwide Penguin Group and is owned by Pearson PLC, the global media company who also own the Financial Times, the business information group and Pearson, the world's largest education publishing and technology company.
Read more about Penguin Books: Origins, War Years, Post-war History, Pearson Takeover
Famous quotes containing the words penguin and/or books:
“Rearing three children is like growing a cactus, a gardenia, and a tubful of impatiens. Each needs varying amounts of water, sunlight and pruning. Were I to be absolutely fair, I would have to treat each child as if he or she were absolutely identical to the other siblings, and there would be no profit for anyone in that.”
—Phyllis Theroux, U.S. journalist. “On Being Fair,” Night Lights: Bedtime Stories for Parents in the Dark, Penguin (1987)
“My residence was more favorable, not only to thought, but to serious reading, than a university; and though I was beyond the range of the ordinary circulating library, I had more than ever come within the influence of those books which circulate round the world, whose sentences were first written on bark, and are now merely copied from time to time on to linen paper.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)