Some Tschichold Penguins

‘Tschichold!’ ‘Gesundheit!’

Why choose the penguin, that blameless but distant avian, as name and brand? Allen Lane was following a German precedent: Albatross Books. Founded in 1931, printing cheap mass-market paperback books with standard sizes, covers bearing author and title only rather than art, with different genres colour-coded. The founders John Holroyd-Reece, Max Christian Wegner and Kurt Enoch chose the name albatross for their new imprint more or less adventitiously, because it is the same word in many European languages. And conceivably (though I don’t know) because of its literary associations, via Coleridge’s Mariner. Or maybe not. Come to think of it, that wouldn’t be a very auspicious association for a new press.

Allen Lane copied Albatross’s style closely when, in 1935, he set up Penguin books. For branding and company name he chose a different bird, though it’s a word that (French: manchot) is not the same across all European languages. The format was copied again when, in 1939, Robert de Graaf created Pocket Books in the USA. Albatross went out of business during World War 2, but Penguin and Pocket Books both thrived. Indeed, in American Pocket Books was so successful that ‘pocket book’ became synonymous with paperback, as in France, where livre de poche is still in use today.