80 Years of Penguin Books Explored in NYT

By Dianna Dilworth on Sep. 25, 2015 Galley Cat

Penguin Books is celebrating its 80th birthday this year.

To celebrate, The New York Times Style Magazine has created a visual history of the company’s milestones for this weekend’s issue of the publication. Check it out:

Before Allen Lane began his publishing house in 1935, good books were the purview of the privileged, costing more than many Londoners spent on a week’s rent. But that all changed when Lane, then managing director of the now-defunct Bodley Head, bought the rights to 10 already popular hardcovers (including Ernest Hemingway’s “A Farewell to Arms” and Agatha Christie’s “The Mysterious Affair at Styles”), redesigning each with a uniform set of specs so simple that even small, inexperienced print shops could mass-produce them on the cheap.

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