Penguin Books

Penguin Books Limited is a British publishing house that was co-founded in 1935 by Allen Lane with his brothers Richard and John. Originally an imprint of publishers The Bodley Head, Penguin became a separate company the following year. Penguin revolutionised publishing in the 1930s with its inexpensive paperbacks, sold through Woolworths and other shops for sixpence, bringing high-quality fiction and non-fiction to the mass market. When the first Penguin paperbacks were launched in 1935, they were priced at just sixpence, the same as a packet of cigarettes, making quality literature affordable to a mass audience. Its success showed that large audiences existed for serious books. It also affected modern British society through its books concerning politics, the arts and science. Penguin Books is now an imprint of the multinational Penguin Random House, a conglomerate formed in 2013 by its merger with American publisher Random House, a subsidiary of German media conglomerate Bertelsmann. Penguin Group had been wholly-owned by Pearson plc, the British global media company which also owned the Financial Times. When Penguin Random House was formed, Pearson had a 47 per cent stake in the new company, which was reduced to 25 per cent in July 2017. Since April 2020, Penguin Random House has been a wholly-owned subsidiary of Bertelsmann. It is part of the Big Five, a group of the largest English-language publishers, along with Holtzbrinck–Macmillan, Hachette, HarperCollins and Simon & Schuster. Penguin Books has its registered office in the City of Westminster, London.