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Penguin Books
Publishing company
Location(s)
Langham Place
London
W1B 3DA
United Kingdom
About
Originally an imprint of the publishing firm Bodley Head, Penguin Books was established by Allen Lane in 1935 and pioneered the paperback book, bringing affordable fiction and non-fiction to the British public.
V. K. Krishna Menon worked as general editor on the Pelican list from its inception in 1936 until 1938. Accounts of the extent and nature of his involvement in this non-fiction imprint vary, but it is generally acknowledged that he played a significant part in its establishment. In a 1967 history of the company, Victor Weybright describes Menon visiting Lane in the crypt of Holy Trinity Church, Marylebone Road (Penguin’s first premises) with written permission from Bernard Shaw for Penguin to publish a paperback edition of his Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism. Lane, who had, by coincidence, just overheard a customer in a shop mistakenly referring to a Penguin as a ‘Pelican’ and been struck by the appeal of this as an additional brand name, immediately decided to publish Shaw’s work as the first title of the brand-new Pelican list. Appointing Menon as general editor, Lane also asked the economist H. L. Beales and W. E. Williams, Secretary of the British Institute for Adult Education, to join the team as editorial advisors. The list, which consisted of paperback editions of existing titles as well as original titles, crossed disciplinary boundaries, extending from art to history to politics to science, and included work by eminent writers and scholars such as H. G. Wells, Harold Laski, Roger Fry, Leonard Woolf, Clive Bell and Sigmund Freud.
Correspondence between Menon and Lane throughout 1938 documents the gradual deterioration of the relationship between the two men and the eventual ejection of Menon from the company in December 1938. Penguin published K. S. Shelvankar’s controversial The Problem of India in 1941. Fiercely critical of the colonial government in India and considered to be dangerously polemical, the book was banned in India. Mulk Raj Anand’s Untouchable and Coolie were published in paperback by Penguin in 1940 and 1945, respectively, and in 1944 a second edition of US-based Indian author Dham Gopal Mukerji’s award-winning Gay-Neck was published by Puffin Story Books.
Mulk Raj Anand, H. L. Beales, Clive Bell, Bonamy Dobree, Sigmund Freud, Eunice Frost, Roger Fry, H. B. S. Haldane, Allen Lane, Harold Laski, Ethel Mannin, Aubrey Menen, V. K. Krishna Menon, Peter Chalmers Mitchell, Dham Gopal Mukerji, Bernard Shaw, K. S. Shelvankar, Beatrice Webb, H. G. Wells, Leonard Woolf, W. E. Williams.
The first 30–40 titles of the Pelican list were edited by V. K. Krishna Menon. These are:
Bell, Clive, Civilization (1928)
Shaw, George Bernard, The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism, Capitalism and Sovietism (1) (1928)
Allen, F. L., Only Yesterday (1) (1931)
Allen, F. L., Only Yesterday (2) (1931)
Crowther, J. G., An Outline of the Universe (1) (1931)
Dobree, Bonamy and Manwaring, G. E., The Floating Republic (1935)
Wells, H. G., A Short History of the World (reissued in Pelican after appearing in Penguin series) (1936)
Cole, G. D. H., Practical Economics (1937)
Fabre, J. H., Social Life in the Insect World (1937)
Fry, Roger, Vision and Design (1937)
Haldane, J. B. S., The Inequality of Man (1937)
Halevy, Elie, A History of the English People in 1815 (1) (1937)
Halevy, Elie, A History of the English People in 1815 (2) (1937)
Harrison, G. B. (ed.) A Book of English Poetry: Chaucer to Rossetti (1937)
Huxley, Julian, Essays in Popular Science (1937)
Jeans, James, The Mysterious Universe (1937)
Laski, Harold, Liberty in the Modern State (1937)
Massingham, H. J. and Hugh (eds) The Great Victorians (1) (1937)
Perry, W. J., The Growth of Civilization (1937)
Power, Eileen, Medieval People (1937)
Shaw, George Bernard, The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism, Capitalism and Sovietism (2) (1937)
Stapledon, Olaf, Last and First Men (1937)
Tawney, R. H., Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (1937)
Woolf, Leonard, After the Deluge (1937)
Woolley, Leonard, Digging up the Past (1937)
Cole, G. D. H., Socialism in Evolution (1938)
Crowther, J. G., An Outline of the Universe (2) (1938)
Halevy, Elie, A History of the English People in 1815 (3) (1938)
Lambert, R. S., Art in England (1938)
Sullivan, J. W. N., Limitations of Science (1938)
Webb, Beatrice, My Apprenticeship (1938)
Whitehead, A. N., Science and the Modern World (1938)
Woolley, Leonard, Ur of the Chaldees (1938)
Freud, Sigmund, Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1939)
Harrison, G. B., Introducing Shakespeare (1939)
Huxley Julian, et al., We Europeans (1939)
Sullivan, J. W. N., The Bases of Modern Science (1939)
Titles by South Asian writers published by Penguin include:
Anand, Mulk Raj, Untouchable (Penguin, 1940; first published by Lawrence & Wishart, 1935)
Shelvankar, K. S., The Problem of India (Penguin Specials, 1940)
Mukerji, Dham Gopal, Gay-Neck (Puffin Story Books, 1944; first published by J. M. Dent, 1928)
Anand, Mulk Raj, Coolie (Penguin, 1945; first published by Lawrence & Wishart, 1936)
Edwards, Russell and Hare, Steve (eds) Pelican Books: A Sixtieth Anniversary Celebration ([Edinburgh]: Penguin Collectors' Society, 1997)
George, T. J. S., Krisha Menon: A Biography (London: Jonathan Cape, 1963)
Hare, Steve (ed.) Penguin Portrait: Allen Lane and the Penguin Editors, 1935–1970 (London: Penguin, 1995)
Lewis, Jeremy, Penguin Special: The Life and Times of Allen Lane (London: Penguin, 2005)
Penguin Books, Penguins Progress, 1935–60 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1960)
Weybright, Victor, The Making of a Publisher (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1968)
Penguin Books Archive, University of Bristol
Italics seem, from my experience, to confuse the English reader and to increase the gulf between him and my alien subject matter, when all my efforts are calculated to show, not how queer the Indians are but how human and like everyone else, in spite of these particular horrors.
Letter from Mulk Raj Anand to Mr Maynard of Penguin, dated 20 October 1940, Penguin Books Archive, University of Bristol
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