The Penguin Collectors Society (PCS) is a charity based in the United Kingdom. Its main purpose is to promote the study and research of all aspects of Penguin Books, the publishing company founded by Allen Lane in 1935.
The Penguin Collectors Society (PCS) is a charity based in the United Kingdom. Its main purpose is to promote the study and research of all aspects of Penguin Books, the publishing company founded by Allen Lane in 1935.
The PCS was started in 1973 by a small group of enthusiasts in Richmond, southwest London. The group recognised the importance of Penguin's contribution to publishing history, its innovations in book design and typography, and the role that its many thousands of published titles play in influencing and educating generations of readers. While it is evident that this rich cultural heritage should be preserved for future generations, paperbacks, by their nature, are not hard wearing and many of them eventually get thrown away. The PCS is therefore committed to the acquisition and conservation of Penguin books and related material, which it regularly donates to the Penguin Archive at the University of Bristol. [1]
The organisation had 38 members in 1974, and currently has around 500 members Internationally. [2]
The organization does not require its members to collect Penguin books, although some members are collectors. Its members' reasons for joining range from:
The PCS is funded by annual subscriptions from its members and by sales of its publications to non-members (members receive a copy of each new PCS publication). Research, writing, book production and all administrative duties are undertaken by trustees and other members on a voluntary basis. The PCS was registered as a limited company in 2001 and became a registered charity the following year. [3] Its members usually meet twice a year, once being for the Annual General Meeting which is held at a different UK venue each year.
The PCS publishes a twice-yearly journal along with other titles in book form, some of which are listed below:
Further details of these and other publications can be found on the PCS website. [6] [7]
Arthur Rackham was an English book illustrator. He is recognised as one of the leading figures during the Golden Age of British book illustration. His work is noted for its robust pen and ink drawings, which were combined with the use of watercolour, a technique he developed due to his background as a journalistic illustrator.
Penguin Books Limited is a British publishing house. It was co-founded in 1935 by Allen Lane with his brothers Richard and John, as a line of the publishers The Bodley Head, only becoming a separate company the following year. Penguin revolutionised publishing in the 1930s through its inexpensive paperbacks, sold through Woolworths and other stores for sixpence, bringing high-quality fiction and non-fiction to the mass market. Its success showed that large audiences existed for serious books. It also affected modern British popular culture significantly through its books concerning politics, the arts, and science.
Alan Aldridge was a British artist, graphic designer and illustrator. He is best known for his psychedelic artwork made for books and record covers by The Beatles and The Who.
Charles Edmund Brock was a widely published English painter, line artist and book illustrator, who signed most of his work C. E. Brock. He was the eldest of four artist brothers, including Henry Matthew Brock, also an illustrator.
Hairy Maclary and Friends is a series of children's picture books created by New Zealand author and illustrator Dame Lynley Dodd. The popular series has sold over five million copies worldwide. The character Hairy Maclary made his first appearance in 1983 in the book titled Hairy Maclary from Donaldson's Dairy. He is the protagonist in twelve books in the series, and there are a further nine books about his friends.
Puffin Books is a longstanding children's imprint of the British publishers Penguin Books. Since the 1960s, it has been among the largest publishers of children's books in the UK and much of the English-speaking world. The imprint now belongs to Penguin Random House, a subsidiary of the German media conglomerate Bertelsmann.
Penguin Classics is an imprint of Penguin Books under which classic works of literature are published in English, Spanish, Portuguese, and Korean among other languages. Literary critics see books in this series as important members of the Western canon, though many titles are translated or of non-Western origin; indeed, the series for decades since its creation included only translations, until it eventually incorporated the Penguin English Library imprint in 1986. The first Penguin Classic was E. V. Rieu's translation of The Odyssey, published in 1946, and Rieu went on to become general editor of the series. Rieu sought out literary novelists such as Robert Graves and Dorothy Sayers as translators, believing they would avoid "the archaic flavour and the foreign idiom that renders many existing translations repellent to modern taste".
Germano Facetti was an Italian graphic designer who headed design at Penguin Books from 1962 to 1971.
Romek Marber was a Polish-born British graphic designer and academic known for his work illustrating the covers of Penguin Books. He retired in 1989, becoming a Professor Emeritus of Middlesex University.
Janet Ahlberg and Allan Ahlberg were a British married couple who created many children's books, including picture books that regularly appear at the top of "most popular" lists for public libraries. They worked together for 20 years until Janet's death from cancer in 1994. He wrote the books and she illustrated them. Allan Ahlberg has also written dozens of books with other illustrators.
Anthony Richard James Wylie Godwin was an influential British publisher of the 1960s/1970s. His contribution to the publishing industry is recognized in the form of the Tony Godwin Memorial Trust.
George Worsley Adamson, RE, MCSD was a book illustrator, writer, and cartoonist, who held American and British dual citizenship from 1931.
The illustration of manuscript books was well established in ancient times, and the tradition of the illuminated manuscript thrived in the West until the invention of printing. Other parts of the world had comparable traditions, such as the Persian miniature. Modern book illustration comes from the 15th-century woodcut illustrations that were fairly rapidly included in early printed books, and later block books. Other techniques such as engraving, etching, lithography and various kinds of colour printing were to expand the possibilities and were exploited by such masters as Daumier, Doré or Gavarni.
There are more than 100 illustrators of English-language editions of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking-Glass (1871), with many other artists for non-English language editions. The illustrator for the original editions was John Tenniel, whose illustrations for Alice and Looking Glass are among the best known illustrations ever published.
Jill Masefield McDonald was a New-Zealand-born children's writer and illustrator, working in the United Kingdom from the mid-1960s. Much of her work was done for Puffin Books, the children's imprint of Penguin, and for its club's magazine Puffin Post.
Lakeside Press was a Chicago publishing imprint under which the RR Donnelley Company produced fine books as well as mail order catalogs, telephone directories, encyclopedias, and advertising. The Press was best known for its high quality editions for the Chicago Caxton Club as well as the Lakeside Classics, a series of fine reprints.
Jack Townend (1918–2005) was a British illustrator and graphic artist. He was best known for his lithographic children's books, his contemporaries include Jan Lewitt, George Him, Hans Tisdall and Barnett Freedman.
Sybil Tawse, English artist and illustrator.
Isabel Alexander (1910-1996) was a British artist and illustrator whose work encompassed drawing, water colour, oils, lithography, lino-printing and three-dimensional work, and whose output ranged from socially-engaged documentation of the lives and work of Welsh coalminers, Irish fishermen and English farmworkers through book illustration to landscapes, seascapes and abstracts. Like many other women artists of her generation she struggled during her lifetime for opportunity and recognition in a field that was overwhelmingly male and her significance has only belatedly begun to be acknowledged.
Hilary Stebbing (1915-1996) was an artist, illustrator and children's author particularly associated with Puffin Books, and active in the United Kingdom from the 1940s to the 1960s.
