[11][12] The first Penguin paperbacks were published in 1935,[13] but at first only as an imprint of The Bodley Head[4] (of Vigo Street, London) with the books originally distributed from the crypt of Holy Trinity Church Marylebone.

Though the publication of literature in paperback was then associated mainly with poor quality lurid fiction, the Penguin brand owed something to the short-lived Albatross imprint of British and American reprints that briefly traded in 1932.

Penguin Books Inc was incorporated in 1939 to satisfy US copyright law; and, despite being a late entrant into an already well established paperback market, enjoyed further success under vice president Kurt Enoch with such titles as What Plane Is That and The New Soldier Handbook.

Though it had no formal role in the war effort, it was integral to it thanks to the publication of such bestselling manuals as Keeping Poultry and Rabbits on Scraps and Aircraft Recognition, and supplying books for the services and British POWs.

Paper rationing was the besetting problem of publishers in wartime, with the fall of France cutting off supply of esparto grass, one of the constituents of the pulp Penguin used.

On 20 April 1961, Penguin became a publicly listed company on the London Stock Exchange; consequently, Allen Lane had a diminished role at the firm though he was to continue as managing director.

In May 1960, Tony Godwin was appointed as editorial adviser, rapidly rising to Chief Editor from which position he sought to broaden the range of Penguin's list and keep up with new developments in graphic design.

Other titles published by Penguin which gained media attention, and controversy, include Massacre by Siné, Spycatcher, which was suppressed in the UK by the government for a time, and The Satanic Verses, leading to its author Salman Rushdie having to go into hiding for some years after Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran issued a Fatwā, an edict amounting to a sentence of death against him.

[38] The savings from the author's payments on these royalty-free titles were instead invested in commissioning wood-engravings from Robert Gibbings and his circle emanating from the Central School of Arts and Crafts.

Prior to 2002, the text page typography of each book in the Classics series had been overseen by a team of in-house designers; this department was drastically reduced in 2003 as part of the production costs.

Recognising his own limitations Lane appointed V. K. Krishna Menon as the first commissioning editor of the series,[44] supported by an advisory panel consisting of Peter Chalmers Mitchell, H. L. Bales and W. E. Williams.

Several thousand Pelicans were published over the next half-century and brought high quality accounts of the current state of knowledge in many fields, often written by authors of specialised academic books.

[46] In 1965 Penguin entered the field of educational publishing, Allen Lane's aim being to carry the radical and populist spirit of Pelicans into the schoolbook market.

They included highly topical books such as The Hornsey Affair and Warwick University Ltd, reflecting the student unrest of the late 1960s and contributing to the intense national debate about the purpose of higher education.

Following Allen Lane's death in 1970 and the takeover the same year by Pearson Longman, the division discontinued publishing school books and was closed in March 1974.

Their purpose was to offer in-depth analysis of current affairs that would counter the perceived bias of the newspapers in addition to being the company's response to the popularity of Gollancz's Left Book Club.

Speed of publication and delivery (a turnaround of weeks rather than months) were essential to the topicality and therefore success of the Specials, Genevieve Tabouis's anti-appeasement tract Blackmail or War sold over 200,000 copies for example.

However even this immediacy did not prevent them being overtaken by events: Shiela Grant Duff's Europe and the Czechs only made it onto the bookstands on the day of the Munich agreement, but nevertheless went on to be a bestseller.

Thirty-five Penguin Specials were published before the outbreak of war, including two novels Hašek's Good Soldier Schweik and Bottome's The Mortal Storm; they collectively made a significant contribution to the public debate of the time, with many of the more controversial titles being the subject of leading articles in the press.

[49] Godwin initiated the "What's Wrong with Britain" series of Specials in the run up to the 1964 election, which constituted a platform for the New Left's brand of cultural analysis that characterised the leftist political radicalism of the 1960s.

Indeed, Penguin Books contributed to the funds that set up Richard Hoggart and Stuart Hall's Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at Birmingham University in 1964.

The Picture Books' 120 titles resulted in 260 variants altogether, the last number 116 Paxton Chadwick's Life Histories, was issued hors série in 1996 by the Penguin Collector's Society.

The Puffin authors' list added Arthur Ransome, Roald Dahl and Ursula K. Le Guin during Webb's editorship and saw the creation of the Peacock series of teenage fiction.

Tony Lacey took over Webb's editorial chair in 1979 at the invitation of Penguin managing director Peter Mayer[57] when Puffin was one of the few profitable divisions of the beleaguered company.

[60] Though Pevsner's ambition for the series was to educate and inform the general public on the subtleties of English architectural history, the immediate commercial imperative was competition with the Shell Guides edited by John Betjeman of which 13 had been published by 1939.

Wartime paper rationing, which had resulted in a generous allocation to Penguin, also forced the reduction in space for book reviews and advertising in the newspapers and was partly the cause of the folding of several literary journals, consequently left a gap in the magazine market that Lane hoped to fill.

In January 1941 the first issue of Penguin New Writing appeared and instantly dominated the market with 80,000 copies sold compared to its closest rival, Cyril Connolly's Horizon, which mustered 3,500 sales in its first edition.

Penguin New Writing's editor John Lehmann was instrumental in introducing the British public to such new writers as Lawrence Durrell, Saul Bellow and James Michie.

Others such as The Bayeux Tapestry by Eric Maclagan (1943), Ur : The First Phases by Leonard Woolley (1946) or Russian Icons (1947) by David Talbot Rice were distillations by experts of their own pioneering works.

[79] Despite their relatively high price they were a financial success, yet for Pevsner they were intended primarily as graduate level texts in what was, for the English speaking world, the newly emerging academic discipline of art history.