With the risk lower, the board agreed.įor his new paperbacks, Lane needed a name, a logo and a look for his books. Lane and his brothers, Dick and John, proposed the idea to The Bodley Head, but it was rejected until the brothers “suggested marketing the paperbacks as though from The Bodley Head but using their own private capital”, writes Baines. He came up with the idea of “publishing cheap, good-looking reprints of fiction and non-fiction in paperback”, writes Phil Baines in his book Penguin by Design. In 1934 Lane - then the publishing director of The Bodley Head - stopped at a book stall at Exeter St Davids, where he wasn’t impressed with the quality and price of the books. The story of how Penguin came to be is well known. He says the “quirky” character of the penguin is a quality the company shares, so there’s “potential to establish a brilliant and lasting” brand, fullfilling the hopes of its founder Allen Lane. For her, the logo has endured "because it is simple, because it is easy to identify, and as a brand says quality”.Īngus Hyland, who was responsible for redesigning the logo in 2003, says part of the reason the image is so iconic is because “a picture, after all, paints a thousand words”. Hannah Lowery, archivist and special collections manager at the University of Bristol, is in charge of the Penguin Archive. #VBOOK LOGO ARCHIVE#Image: Penguin Archive at the University of Bristol Library Special Collections But the Penguin logo is instantly recognisable, and seeing it readers know exactly what they’re getting: an excellent book from a company that cares about reading. Few publishers' logos are recognised around the world after all, we’re too busy reading books to be staring at the spine or the imprint page. He was probably one of many visitors that day, and one of millions during the zoo’s lifetime.īut what made Young’s trip significant is that the birds he went to see would become the inspiration for one of the most iconic logos in the world: Young’s drawing of the penguins went on to be the logo for the books company that shares its name with the flightless bird.Īlthough the Penguin logo has changed slightly since Young’s original – in which the penguin was plumper than it is now and appeared to be in the midst of moving – it has endured for decades. In 1935, on an otherwise unremarkable day, a 21-year-old called Edward Young visited London Zoo.
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