Erhalten Sie Zugang zu diesem und mehr als 300000 Büchern ab EUR 5,99 monatlich.
This carefully crafted ebook is formatted for your eReader with a functional and detailed table of contents. Me Before You is a romance novel written by Jojo Moyes. The book was first published on 5 January 2012 in the United Kingdom. A sequel titled After You was released 29 September 2015 through Pamela Dorman Books. This book has been derived from Wikipedia: it contains the entire text of the title Wikipedia article + the entire text of all the 21 related (linked) Wikipedia articles to the title article. This book does not contain illustrations. e-Pedia (an imprint of e-artnow) charges for the convenience service of formatting these e-books for your eReader. We donate a part of our net income after taxes to the Wikimedia Foundation from the sales of all books based on Wikipedia content.
Sie lesen das E-Book in den Legimi-Apps auf:
Seitenzahl: 826
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017
Das E-Book (TTS) können Sie hören im Abo „Legimi Premium” in Legimi-Apps auf:
Ähnliche
e-Pedia: Me Before You
Recommended titles:
e-Pedia: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
e-Pedia: P.T. (video Game)
e-Pedia: Mary Poppins
e-Pedia: Wanted (2008 Film)
e-Pedia: Pride and Prejudice
e-Pedia: Fifty Shades Darker
e-Pedia: Sense and Sensibility
e-Pedia: Fifty Shades of Grey
e-Pedia: Never Let Me Go (Novel)
e-Pedia: James Bond
Main table of contents:
Me Before You
Introduction
Plot
Characters
Reception
Film adaptation
References
External links
Linked articles
Contents
Me Before You
Me Before You is a romance novel written by Jojo Moyes. The book was first published on 5 January 2012 in the United Kingdom. A sequel titled After You was released 29 September 2015 through Pamela Dorman Books.[1][2]
Plot
Twenty-six-year-old Louisa Clark lives with her working-class family. Unambitious and with few qualifications, she feels constantly outshone by her younger sister, Treena, an outgoing single mother. Louisa, who helps support her family, loses her job at a local cafe. She goes to the Job Centre and, after several failed attempts, is offered a unique employment opportunity: help care for Will Traynor, a successful, wealthy, and once-active young man who was paralyzed in a motorcycle accident two years earlier. Will's mother, Camilla, hires Louisa despite her lack of experience, believing Louisa can brighten his spirit. Louisa meets Nathan, who cares for Will's medical needs, and Will's father, Steven, a friendly upper-class businessman whose marriage to Camilla is strained.
Louisa and Will's relationship starts out rocky due to his bitterness and resentment over being disabled. Things worsen after Will's ex-girlfriend, Alicia, and best friend Rupert reveal that they are getting married. Under Louisa's care, Will gradually becomes more communicative and open-minded as they share experiences together. Louisa notices Will's scarred wrists and later overhears his mother and sister discussing how he attempted suicide shortly after Camilla refused his request to end his life through Dignitas, a Swiss-based assisted suicide organization. Horrified by his attempt, Camilla promised to honour her son's wish, but only if he agreed to live six more months. Camilla intends to prove that, in time, he will believe his life's worth living.
Louisa conceals knowing about Will and Camilla's agreement. However, she tells Treena, and together they devise ways that will help convince Will to abandon his death wish. Over the next few weeks, Will loosens up and lets Louisa shave his beard and cut his shaggy hair. Louisa begins taking Will on outings and the two grow closer.
Through their frequent talks, Louisa learns that Will has travelled extensively; his favourite place is a cafe in Paris. Noticing how limited her life is and that she has few ambitions, Will tries to motivate Louisa to change.
Louisa continues seeing her longtime boyfriend, Patrick, though they eventually break up due to her relationship with Will. Meanwhile, Louisa's father loses his job, causing more financial difficulties. Fortunately, Mr. Traynor offers Mr. Clark a position. Louisa realises that Will is trying to help her secure her freedom from her family. The two attend Alicia and Rupert's wedding where they dance and flirt. Will tells Louisa that she is the only reason he wakes in the morning.
Louisa convinces Will to go on a holiday with her, but before they can leave, Will contracts near fatal pneumonia. Louisa cancels the plans for a whirlwind trip. Instead, she takes Will to the island of Mauritius. The night before returning home, Louisa tells Will that she loves him. Will says he wants to confide something, but she admits that she already knows about his plans with Dignitas. Will says their time together has been special, but he cannot bear to live in a wheelchair. He will be following through with his plans. Angry and hurt, Louisa storms off and does not speak to him for the remainder of the trip. When they return home, Will's parents are pleasantly surprised by his good physical condition. Louisa, however, resigns as his caretaker, and they understand that Will intends to end his life.
On the night of Will's flight to Switzerland, Louisa visits him one last time. They agree that the past six months have been the best in their lives. He dies shortly after in the clinic, and it is revealed that he left Louisa a considerable inheritance, meant to continue her education and to fully experience life. The novel ends with Louisa at a cafe in Paris, reading Will's last words to her in a letter, that tell her to 'live well'.
Characters
Reception
Reception for Me Before You has been positive and the book was placed on the Richard and Judy Book Club.[5][6]USA Today and the New York Times both praised the work,[7] with the New York Times reviewer commenting that "When I finished this novel, I didn’t want to review it; I wanted to reread it."[8]
Disability advocates have criticized the book and film for suggesting that life may not be worth living for some with severe disabilities.[9]
Film adaptation
In 2014 MGM announced it would make a film adaptation of Me Before You, to be directed by Thea Sharrock[10] and released via Warner Bros. The film was initially set to release in August 2015 but was pushed back to 3 June 2016.[11]
Emilia Clarke and Sam Claflin portray the main characters, and filming began in the spring of 2015.[12] The film has grossed over $200 million worldwide.
References
External links
This page was last edited on 21 May 2017, at 04:07.
This text is based on the Wikipedia article Me Before You: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Me_Before_You which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License available online at: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/legalcode List of authors: https://tools.wmflabs.org/xtools/wikihistory/wh.php?page_title=Me_Before_YouContents
Me Before You (film)
Me Before You is a 2016 British-American romanticdrama film directed by Thea Sharrock as her directorial debut and adapted by English author Jojo Moyes from her 2012 novel of the same name. The film stars Emilia Clarke, Sam Claflin, Steve Peacocke, Jenna Coleman, Charles Dance, Matthew Lewis, Janet McTeer, Vanessa Kirby and Joanna Lumley.
Set in the UK, the film is shot in various historic locations around the country, including Pembroke Castle in Wales, and Chenies Manor House in Buckinghamshire, England. The film was released on June 3, 2016, in the US, received mixed reviews on Metacritic and grossed $207 million worldwide.[4][5]
Plot
26-year-old Louisa Clark (Emilia Clarke) is a happy, outgoing woman who lives with and supports her working-class family. After losing her job at a local cafe, she is hired as the caregiver of Will Traynor (Sam Claflin), a former successful banker and once active young man who became paralyzed after being involved in a motorcycle accident two years prior. Louisa has no experience but Will's mother believes her cheery personality will help lift his spirits. Will only spends time with Nathan, his male nurse, who assists with his care, exercise and movement and knows that he will never regain use of his body due to the damage to his spinal cord.
Cynical and depressed because he can no longer live an active life, he initially reacts coldly to Louisa's upbeat demeanor and treats her with contempt. After two weeks, Will has a visit from his former best friend Rupert and ex-girlfriend Alicia who reveal that they are engaged. Will manages to smash all the photographs on his dresser in anger and indignation, which Louisa tries to repair the next day, leading to a verbal altercation during which Louisa chastises him for being an arse. The next day, Will asks Louisa to watch a film with subtitles with him, and she accepts. The two begin to bond and eventually become close friends. Louisa and Will continue to talk daily; she learns that he is cultured and worldly, having traveled extensively. In contrast, her life so far has been simple, without many interests or hobbies or travel away from home. Her long-term boyfriend, Patrick (Matthew Lewis), is training to take part in a Viking triathlon in Norway, a hobby that he often chooses over spending time with her. Will urges Louisa to broaden her horizons and tells her that it's her responsibility to live life as fully as possible.
While taking care of him during one of his occasional illnesses, Louisa notices Will's scarred wrists from a previous suicide attempt. While at work one day, Louisa overhears an argument of Will's parents and she learns that Will has given his parents six months before checking in to Dignitas in Switzerland for assisted suicide. Will refuses to accept life with a disability that entails dependency, pain and suffering without any hope for recovery of his old self. Louisa then takes it upon herself to change his mind. She organizes various trips and adventures to show Will that life is worth living, despite his disability. Will gradually becomes more communicative and open to her plans. The pair attends the horse-racing, with disastrous consequences and a few days afterwards, goes to a Mozart concert. Will then decides to attend Alicia's wedding and asks Louisa to accompany him. At the wedding, Louisa and Will enjoy offending the straight-laced guests. Louisa learns from the bride's godmother that she considers Will to be Alicia's 'one that got away'.
Will joins Louisa's family for dinner on her birthday, where they learn that Louisa's father had lost his job in a leveraged buyout that happened to have been organized by a younger associate of Will. Shortly thereafter Louisa's father is offered the head of maintenance job at Stortfold Castle which belongs to Will's family and Louisa realizes that Will is trying to help her secure her freedom from her family. Gradually they develop strong feelings for one another, which makes Patrick jealous and causes problems in Louisa's long-standing relationship, leading to their break-up.
During a luxurious trip to the island of Mauritius together, undertaken after another bout with pneumonia and with help from Will's male nurse, Will informs Louisa that he still intends to follow through with the euthanasia. He wants her to live a full life instead of "half a life" with him. He says their time together has been special, but he cannot bear to live in a wheelchair. He asks her to accompany him to Switzerland to be with him through his last moments. Heartbroken, she informs Will's parents upon arrival in London that she is quitting immediately and travels back to her home by bus. She does not speak to Will for the days that follow. However, at home, Louisa's father convinces her to go to Will in Switzerland. She finds out that he has already left for Switzerland, and decides to go to to Switzerland herself to be with Will in his final moments.
A few weeks after Will's death, sitting in his favorite cafe in Paris, she rereads the letter Will left for her. In it he encourages her to seek out a specific perfume shop and ends off the letter with 'just live', which she can afford to do because he has left her enough money to follow her dreams.
Cast
Production
On April 2, 2014, it was announced Thea Sharrock would direct the film.[11] On September 2, 2014, Emilia Clarke and Sam Claflin were cast in the film.[6]Stephen Peacocke was cast on March 24, 2015,[12] with Jenna Coleman and Charles Dance cast on April 2, 2015.[7] On April 9, 2015, Janet McTeer joined the cast;[8] and Brendan Coyle, Matthew Lewis, Samantha Spiro, Vanessa Kirby, and Ben Lloyd-Hughes joined the cast the next day.[9]
Filming
Principal photography began in April 2015, and ended on June 26, 2015.[13][14] The film was shot in various locations in the UK, including Pembroke, Wales, and Chenies Manor House, Chenies, Buckinghamshire, England for the wedding scenes, while Majorca, Spain, stands in for Mauritius.[15]
Release
In July 2014, it was announced that the film would be released on August 21, 2015.[16] In May 2015, the film's release date was moved to June 3, 2016.[17] In November 2015, the film's release date was moved back, to March 4, 2016,[18] before being delayed again in January 2016, to its previous June 3, 2016 release date.[19]
Reception
Box office
Me Before You grossed $56.2 million in North America and over $151.2 million in other territories for a total of $207.4 million, against a budget of $20 million.[4]
In North America, Me Before You opened on June 3, 2016 alongside Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows and was expected to gross around $15 million from 2,704 theaters in its opening weekend.[20] The film grossed $1.4 million from its Thursday night previews and $7.8 million on its first day.[21] In its opening weekend the film grossed $18.3 million, finishing third at the box office behind Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows ($35.3 million) and X-Men: Apocalypse ($22.3 million).[22]
Critical response
On Rotten Tomatoes, the film has a rating of 58% based on 151 reviews; the average rating is 5.5/10. The site's critical consensus reads, "Me Before You benefits from Emilia Clarke and Sam Claflin's alluring chemistry, although it isn't enough to compensate for its clumsy treatment of a sensitive subject."[23] On Metacritic the film has a score of 51 out of 100 based on 36 critics, indicating "mixed or average reviews".[5] Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "A" on an A+ to F scale.[24]
Accolades
Controversy
The film has suffered a backlash from many people in the disability rights movement due to what they perceive as an underlying message that people with disabilities are a burden on their families and careers, and claim the film promotes the view that people are better off dead than disabled.[28] They view the film as advocating suicide so that their loved ones can "live boldly".[29][30] The #MeBeforeEuthanasia backlash has been led by celebrities with disabilities such as Liz Carr, Penny Pepper,[31]Mik Scarlet[29] and Cherylee Houston and Not Dead Yet UK in the UK,[32][33] and Dominick Evans, Emily Ladau and activists from Not Dead Yet in the US.[34] Protests in the US occurred in Los Angeles, New York City, Boston, various locations in Colorado and Texas, Atlanta, Baltimore, Connecticut, Rochester, San Francisco, and multiple locations around the country. The film was also protested in Australia.[35]
See also
References
External links
This page was last edited on 9 June 2017, at 00:44.
This text is based on the Wikipedia article Me Before You (film): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Me_Before_You_(film) which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License available online at: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/legalcode List of authors: https://tools.wmflabs.org/xtools/wikihistory/wh.php?page_title=Me_Before_You_(film)Contents
Penguin Books
Penguin Books is a Britishpublishing house. It was founded in 1935 by Sir Allen Lane[2] as a line of the publishers The Bodley Head, only becoming a separate company the following year.[3] Penguin revolutionised publishing in the 1930s through its inexpensive paperbacks, sold through Woolworths and other high street stores for sixpence, bringing high-quality paperback fiction and non-fiction to the mass market.[4] Penguin's success demonstrated that large audiences existed for serious books. Penguin also had a significant impact on public debate in Britain, through its books on British culture, politics, the arts, and science.[5]
Penguin Books is now an imprint of the worldwide Penguin Random House, an emerging conglomerate which was formed in 2013 by the merger of the two publishers.[6] Formerly, Penguin Group was wholly owned by Pearson PLC, the global media company which also owned the Financial Times,[7] but it now retains only a minority holding of 47% of the stock against Random House owner Bertelsmann which controls the majority stake. It is one of the largest English-language publishers, formerly known as the "Big Six", now the "Big Five".
Origins
The first Penguin paperbacks were published in 1935,[8] but at first only as an imprint of The Bodley Head[3] (of Vigo Street) with the books originally distributed from the crypt of Holy Trinity Church Marylebone. Only paperback editions were published until the "King Penguin" series debuted in 1939,[9] and latterly the Pelican History of Art was undertaken: these were unsuitable as paperbacks because of the length and copious illustrations on art paper so cloth bindings were chosen instead. Penguin Books has its registered office in the City of Westminster, London, England.[10][11]
Anecdotally, Lane recounted how it was his experience with the poor quality of reading material on offer at Exeter train station that inspired him to create cheap, well designed quality books for the mass market.[12] However the question of how publishers could reach a larger public had been the subject of a conference at Rippon Hall, Oxford in 1934 at which Lane had been an attendee. 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.[13] Inexpensive paperbacks did not initially appear viable to Bodley Head, since the deliberately low price of 6 d. made profitability seem unlikely. This helped Allen Lane purchase publication rights for some works more cheaply than he otherwise might have done since other publishers were convinced of the short term prospects of the business. In the face of resistance from the traditional book trade[14] it was the purchase of 63,000 books by Woolworth[15] that paid for the project outright, confirmed its worth and allowed Lane to establish Penguin as a separate business in 1936. By March 1936, ten months after the company's launch on 30 July 1935, one million Penguin books had been printed. This early flush of success brought expansion and the appointment of Eunice Frost, first as a secretary then as editor and ultimately as a director, who was to have a pivotal influence in shaping the company.[16] It was Frost who in 1945 was entrusted with the reconstruction of Penguin Inc after the departure of its first managing director Ian Ballantine.[17] Penguin Inc had been incorporated in 1939 in order to satisfy US copyright law, and had enjoyed some success under its vice president Kurt Enoch with such titles as What Plane Is That and The New Soldier Handbook despite being a late entrant into an already well established paperback market.
From the outset, design was essential to the success of the Penguin brand. Avoiding the illustrated gaudiness of other paperback publishers, Penguin opted for the simple appearance of three horizontal bands, the upper and lower of which were colour-coded according to which series the title belonged to; this is sometimes referred to as the horizontal grid. In the central white panel, the author and title were printed in Gill Sans and in the upper band was a cartouche with the legend "Penguin Books". The initial design was created by the then 21-year-old office junior Edward Young, who also drew the first version of the Penguin logo. Series such as Penguin Specials and The Penguin Shakespeare had individual designs (by 1937 only S1 and B1-B18 had been published).
The colour schemes included: orange and white for general fiction, green and white for crime fiction, cerise and white for travel and adventure, dark blue and white for biographies, yellow and white for miscellaneous, red and white for drama; and the rarer purple and white for essays and belles lettres and grey and white for world affairs. Lane actively resisted the introduction of cover images for several years. Some recent publications of literature from that time have duplicated the original look.
From 1937 and on, the headquarters of Penguin Books was at Harmondsworth west of London and so it remained until the 1990s when a merge with Viking involved the head office moving to London.
War years
The Second World War saw the company established as a national institution, and though it had no formal role, Penguin was integral to the war effort thanks in no small part 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. Penguin printed some 600 titles and started nineteen new series in the six years of the war[18] and a time of enormous increase in the demand for books,[19] consequently Penguin enjoyed a privileged place among its peers.
Paper rationing was the besetting problem of publishers during wartime, with the fall of France cutting off supply of esparto grass, one of the constituents of the pulp Penguin used. As such when rationing was introduced in March 1940 a quota was allocated by the Ministry of Supply to each publisher as a percentage of the amount used by that firm between August 1938 and August 1939.[20] This was particularly advantageous to Penguin who as a volume printer had enjoyed a very successful year that year. Further in a deal with the Canadian Government, Penguin had agreed to exclusively publish editions for their armed forces for which they were paid in tons of paper.[21] By January 1942 the Book Production War Economy Agreement regulations came into force which determined rules on paper quality, type size and margins, consequently Penguin eliminated dust jackets, trimmed margins and replaced sewn bindings with metal staples. Aside from the noticeable deterioration in the appearance of paperbacks it became a practical impossibility to publish books of more than 256 pages resulting in some titles falling out of print for want of material.[22] In addition to their paper allocation Penguin secured a deal in late 1941, through Bill William's connections with ABCA and CEMA, with the War Office to supply the troops with books through what would be known as the Forces Book Club. Penguin would receive 60 tons a month from Paper Supply in return for 10 titles a month in runs of 75,000 at 5d.[23] Previously every paperback carried the message "FOR THE FORCES Leave this book at a Post Office when you have read it, so that men and women in the Services may enjoy it too" at the bottom of the back cover inviting the reader to take advantage of the free transmission of books to the forces by the Post Office. However demand was exceeding supply on the home front leading Lane to seek a monopoly on army books made specifically for overseas distribution. This dominance over the paper supply put Penguin in an especially strong position after the war as rationing continued. Many of its competitors were forced to concede paperback reprint rights to Penguin for this reason as well as the popular prestige the company enjoyed.[23]
Post-war history
See also R v Penguin Books Ltd.
In 1945, Penguin began what would become one of its most important branches, the Penguin Classics, with a translation of Homer's Odyssey by E. V. Rieu. Between 1947 and 1949, the German typographer Jan Tschichold redesigned 500 Penguin books, and left Penguin with a set of influential rules of design principles brought together as the Penguin Composition Rules, a four-page booklet of typographic instructions for editors and compositors. Tschichold's work included the woodcut illustrated covers of the classics series (also known as the medallion series), and with Hans Schmoller, his eventual successor at Penguin, the vertical grid covers that became the standard for Penguin fiction throughout the 1950s. By this time the paperback industry in the UK had begun to grow, and Penguin found itself in competition with then fledgeling Pan Books. Many other series were published such as the Buildings of England, the Pelican History of Art and Penguin Education.
By 1960, a number of forces were to shape the direction of the company, the publication list and its graphic design. 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. New techniques such as phototypesetting and offset-litho printing were to replace hot metal and letterpress printing, dramatically reducing cost and permitting the printing of images and text on the same paper stock, thus paving the way for the introduction of photography and novel approaches to graphic design on paperback covers. 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. To this end, he hired Germano Facetti in January 1961, who was to decisively alter the appearance of the Penguin brand. Beginning with the crime series, Facetti canvassed the opinion of a number of designers including Romek Marber for a new look to the Penguin cover. It was Marber's suggestion of what came to be called the Marber grid along with the retention of traditional Penguin colour-coding that was to replace the previous three horizontal bars design and set the pattern for the design of the company's paperbacks for the next twenty years. Facetti rolled out the new treatment across the Penguin line starting with crime, the orange fiction series, then Pelicans, Penguin Modern Classics, Penguin Specials, and Penguin Classics, giving an overall visual unity to the company's list. A somewhat different approach was taken to the Peregrine, Penguin Poets, Penguin Modern Poets, and Penguin Plays series. There were over a hundred different series published in total.
Just as Lane well judged the public's appetite for paperbacks in the 1930s, his decision to publish Lady Chatterley's Lover by D. H. Lawrence in 1960 boosted Penguin's notoriety. The novel was at the time unpublished in the United Kingdom and the predicted obscenity trial not only marked Penguin as a fearless publisher, it also helped drive the sale of at least 3.5 million copies. Penguin's victory in the case heralded the end to the censorship of books in the UK, although censorship of the written word was only finally defeated after the Inside Linda Lovelace trial of 1978.
Pearson takeover
By the end of the 1960s Penguin was in financial trouble, and several proposals were made for a new operating structure. These included ownership by a consortium of universities, or joint ownership by the Cambridge University Press and Oxford University Press, but none of them came to anything.[24] Sir Allen Lane died on 7 July, and six weeks later, Penguin was acquired by Pearson PLC on 21 August 1970.[25] A new emphasis on profitability emerged and, with the departure of Facetti in 1972, the defining era of Penguin book design came to an end. Later changes included the disappearance of 'Harmondsworth' as the place of publication: this was replaced by a London office address. From 1937 the headquarters of Penguin Books was at Harmondsworth west of London and so it remained until the 1990s when a merger with Viking involved the head office moving into London (27 Wrights Lane, W8 5TZ).
In 1986, Penguin purchased American publisher New American Library and its hard-cover affiliate E.P. Dutton. [26]New American Library had originally been Penguin U.S.A and had been spun off in 1948 because of the high complexity of import and export regulations. In 1986--Penguin repurchased NAL (New American Library) in order to extend its reach into the US market, and NAL saw the move as a way to gain a hold in International markets.[27][28]
Penguin published Deborah Lipstadt's book Denying the Holocaust which accused David Irving of Holocaust denial. Irving sued Lipstadt and Penguin for libel in 1998 but lost in a much publicised court case. 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.
In 2006, Penguin attempted to involve the public in collaboratively writing a novel on a wiki platform. They named this project A Million Penguins. On 7 March 2007, the Penguin Books UK blog announced that the project had come to an end.[29]
In 2014, the Penguin Hotline was created by Madeline McIntosh.[30]
Imprints and series
Penguin Classics
Consonant with Penguin's corporate mission to bring canonical literature to the mass market the company first ventured into publishing the classics in May 1938 with the issue of Penguin Illustrated Classics.[31] The savings from the author's rights on these royalty free titles were instead invested in commissioning woodcut engravings from Robert Gibbings and his circle emanating from the Central School of Arts and Crafts. The books were distinct from the rest of the Penguin marque in their use of a vertical grid (anticipating Tschichold's innovation of 1951) and albertus typeface. The series was not a financial success and the list ceased after just ten volumes the same year it began. Penguin returned to classics with the printing of E. V. Rieu's translation of Homer's Odyssey in 1946, which went on to sell three million copies.[32]
Penguin's commercial motivation was, as ever, populist; rendering the classics in an approachable modern English was therefore a difficult task whose execution did not always satisfy the critics.[33] Dr Rieu said of his work that "I have done my best to make Homer easy reading for those who are unfamiliar with the Greek world."[34] He was joined in 1959 by Betty Radice who was first his assistant then, after his retirement in 1964, she assumed the role of joint editor with Robert Baldick. As the publisher's focus changed from the needs of the marketplace to those of the classroom the criticism became more acute, Thomas Gould wrote of the series "most of the philosophical volumes in the Penguin series are bad - some very bad indeed. Since Plato and Aristotle are the most read philosophers in the world today, and since some of these Penguin translations are favourites among professional philosophers in several countries, this amounts to a minor crisis in the history of philosophy."[35]
The imprint publishes hundreds of classics from the Greeks and Romans to Victorian Literature to modern classics. For nearly twenty years, variously coloured borders to the front and back covers indicated the original language. The second period of design meant largely black covers with a colour illustration on the front. In 2002, Penguin announced it was redesigning its entire catalogue, merging the original Classics list (known in the trade as "Black Classics") with what had been the old Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics list, though the silver covers for the latter have so far been retained for most of the titles. Previously this line had been called 'Penguin Modern Classics' with a pale green livery.
The redesign — featuring a colourful painting on the cover, with black background and orange lettering — was well received. However, the quality of the paperbacks themselves seemed to decrease: the spines were more likely to fold and bend. The paperbacks are also printed on non-acid-free pulp paper, which, by some accounts, tends to yellow and brown within a couple of years.[36]
The text page design was also overhauled to follow a more closely prescribed template, allowing for faster copyediting and typesetting, but reducing the options for individual design variations suggested by a text's structure or historical context (for example, in the choice of text typeface). 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. The in-house text design department still exists, albeit much smaller than formerly, and is managed by text designers, Claire Mason and Lisa Simmonds who oversee the majority of the design work. Recent design work includes the Penguin Little Black Classic series.
Pelican Books
Lane expanded the business in 1937 with the publication of George Bernard Shaw's The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism and Capitalism under the Pelican Books imprint, an imprint designed to educate the reading public rather than entertain. Recognising his own limitations Lane appointed V. K. Krishna Menon as the first commissioning editor of the series, 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.[37] (The Pelican series, in decline for several years, was finally discontinued in 1984.)
Aircraft Recognition (S82) by R. A. Saville-Sneath, was a bestseller. In 1940, the children's imprint Puffin Books began with a series of non-fiction picture books; the first work of children's fiction published under the imprint was Barbara Euphan Todd's Worzel Gummidge the following year. Another series that began in wartime was the Penguin Poets: the first volume was a selection of Tennyson's poems (D1) in 1941. Later examples are The Penguin Book of Modern American Verse (D22), 1954, and The Penguin Book of Restoration Verse (D108), 1968. J. M. Cohen's Comic and Curious Verse appeared in three volumes over a number of years.
Pelican Books was relaunched as a digital imprint in 2014, with four books published simultaneously on 1 May: Economics: A User's Guide by Ha-Joon Chang, The Domesticated Brain by the psychologist Bruce Hood, Revolutionary Russia by Orlando Figes and Human Evolution by the anthropologist Robin Dunbar.[38]
Penguin Education
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. His final major initiative, the division was established as a separate publishing operation from Harmondsworth, and based in West Drayton in Middlesex. During its nine-year life it had a major impact on school books, breaking new ground in their concept and design and strongly influencing other publishers’ lists.
Among the most successful and influential series were Voices and Junior Voices, Connexions, and the Penguin English Project. Alongside these and other series, the imprint continued another Penguin tradition by producing Education Specials, titles which focussed on often controversial topics within education and beyond. 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. Other titles featured the radical and influential ideas about schooling propounded by writers and teachers from America and elsewhere.
Penguin Education also published an extensive range of Readers and introductory texts for students in higher education, notably in subjects such as psychology, economics, management, sociology and science, while for teachers it provided a series of key texts such as Language, the Learner and the School and The Language of Primary School Children. 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. More than 80 teachers, educational journalists and academics signed a letter to the Times Educational Supplement regretting the closure of the influential imprint[39]
Penguin Specials
In November 1937, Penguin inaugurated a new series of short, polemical books under the rubric of Penguin Specials with the publication of Edgar Mowrer's Germany Puts the Clock Back. 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. Whereas the Left Book Club was avowedly pro-Soviet, Penguin and Lane expressed no political preference as their editorial policy, though the widespread belief was that the series was left-leaning since the editor was the communist John Lehmann and its authors were, with a few exceptions,[40] men of the left. 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.
After a hiatus between 1945 and 1949, the Penguin Specials continued after the war under the editorship of first Tom Maschler, then after 1961 Tony Godwin. The first title in the revived series was William Gallacher's The Case for Communism.[41] 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.[42] This brief period of revival for Penguin Specials in contributing to the national dialogue was not sustained after the departure of Godwin in 1967, and with the rise in television journalism the Specials series declined in significance through the 1970s and 1980s. The last Special was published in 1988 with Keith Thompson's Under Siege: Racism and Violence in Britain Today.
In December 2011, Penguin launched nine titles as 'Penguin Shorts'[43] which featured the iconic tri-band covers. These books were novellla and short length works of fiction and/or memoirs. In 2012 they became known as Penguin Specials following an agreement with The Economist in March of that year[44] which focused on the kind of topical journalism that was a feature of the original Penguin Specials. Subsequent Penguin Specials released in 2012 and 2013 continued to include both fiction, including the publication of the works shortlisted for the Monash Undergraduate Prize 2012, and topical journalism.[45] As well as collected columns of cultural critics.[46]
Puffin
Noel Carrington, an editor at Country Life magazine, first approached Lane with the idea of publishing low-cost, illustrated non-fiction children's books in 1938. Inspired by the Editions Père Castor books drawn by Rojan and the technique of autolithography used in the poster art of the time, Carrington's suggestion for what was to become the Puffin Picture Book series was adopted by Penguin in 1940 when, as Lane saw it, evacuated city children would need books on farming and natural history to help adjust to the country.[47] The first four titles appeared in December 1940; War on Land, War at Sea, War in the Air and On the Farm, and a further nine the following year. Despite Lane's intention to publish twelve a year paper and staff shortages meant only thirteen were issued in the first two years of the series. 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.
Inexpensive paperback children's fiction did not exist at the time Penguin sought to expand their list into this new market. To this end Eleanor Graham was appointed in 1941 as the first editor of the Puffin Story Books series,[48] a venture made particularly difficult due to the resistance of publishers and librarians in releasing the rights of their children's books. The first five titles, Worzel Gummidge, Cornish Adventure,The Cuckoo Clock, Garram the Hunter and Smokey were published in the three horizontal stripes company livery of the rest of the Penguin output, a practice abandoned after the ninth volume when full-bleed colour illustrated covers were introduced, a fact that heralded the much greater design freedom of the Puffin series over the rest of Penguin's books.
Graham retired in 1961 and was replaced by Kaye Webb who presided over the department for 18 years in a period that saw greatly increased competition in the children's market as well as a greater sophistication in production and marketing. One innovation of Webb's was the creation of the Puffin Club in 1967 and its quarterly magazine Puffin Post, which at its height had 200,000 members. 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[49] when Puffin was one of the few profitable divisions of the beleaguered company. In line with Mayer's policy of more aggressive commercialisation of the Penguin brand Lacey reduced the number of Puffin imprints, consolidated popular titles under the Puffin Classics rubric and inaugurated the successful interactive gamebook series Fighting Fantasy.[50] Complimentary to the Puffin Club the Puffin School Book Club, addressed specifically to schools and organisations, grew significantly in this period helping to confirm Puffin market position such that by 1983 one in three Penguin books sold was a Puffin.[50]
The Buildings of England
Nikolaus Pevsner first proposed a series of volumes amounting to a county by county survey of the monuments of England in ten or more books to both the Cambridge University Press and Routledge before the war, however for various reason his plan came to nothing.[51] It was only through his involvement with Penguin that he was in a position to make a similar suggestion to Allen Lane and be accepted. Pevsner described the project of the Buildings of England as an attempt to fill the gap in English publishing for those multi-volume survey of national art familiar on the continent. In particular Georg Dehio's Handbuch der deutschen Kunstdenkmaler, a topographical inventory of Germany's important historic buildings that was published in five volumes between 1905 and 1912.[52] 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.[53] With Lane's agreement in 1945 Pevsner began work personally touring the county that was to be the subject of observation aided by notes drawn up by researchers. The first volume, Cornwall, appeared in 1951, and went on to produce 46 architectural guidebooks between then and 1974 of which he wrote 32 alone and ten with assistance. As early as 1954 the series was in commercial difficulty and required sponsorship to continue, a grant from the Leverhulme Trust amongst other sources[54] secured its completion. The series continued after Pevsner's death in 1983, financed in part by the Pevsner Books Trust and published by Yale University Press.
Pevsner's approach was of Kunstgeschichte quite distinct from the antiquarian interest of local and family history typical of English county histories. Consequently, there is little mention of monumental brasses, bells, tracery, the relationship of the building to the landscape.[55] Nor is there much discussion on building techniques, nor industrial architecture, nor on Art Deco buildings, omissions that his critics hold have led to those subjects undervaluation and neglect.[56] Nevertheless, Pevsner's synoptic study brought rigorous architectural history to an appreciative mass audience, and in particular he enlarged the perception of the Victorian achievement in architecture.
Magazine publishing
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
