Penguin Books Case Study Harvard

Penguin Books is an England publishing house that found in 1935 by Allen Lane and his brothers, Richard and John. It first appeared as an imprint of The Bodley Head, publishing house where Allen works as Managing Director, then it shows significant progress in its journey and later be separated. Penguin Books is well known by its inexpensive and well-designed paperback. The idea of publishing cheaper and better quality books was suggested by Allen Lane, when he looks for something to read at Exeter Station and only found poor quality reprints. Then Allen proposed the idea to The Bodley Head, but it was rejected. However, Allen and his brother insisted to publish the books even by using their own fund for the marketing, and the idea then approved by The Bodley Head. For the first imprint, the brothers are cautious about public responses for their books, so they only bound the half amount of the printed copies for each title into

Since its first copies, the only major changes that happen was the change of the text typeface inside, from Old Style No.2 to Times New Roman. Then he looks for people that can help him with the books design, and he found Jan Tschichold. On 1947 Jan Tschichold works in Penguin Books and took over in charge of typography and production for two years—he returned to Switzerland due to worsening exchange rate in 1949. Jan Tschichold was a famous German graphic designer. Since his visit to Bauhaus exhibition in 1924, Tschichold became obsessed with the clean and geometric sans serif typefaces and applying it for his later designs. One of his books, titled The New Typography (1928), became the foundation and guidelines of modern typography today.