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Kirsten Grant, campaigns director at Puffin, will leave Penguin at the end of the month to become a freelance children's marketing specialist.

Grant has 15 years of experience in the children's market and has been involved in the launch and reimagining of brands and authors including Eoin Colfer, Young Bond, Percy Jackson and Cathy Cassidy.

Grant established Roald Dahl Day as an annual school and retail event, and headed up the Puffin 70th anniversary and Very Hungry Caterpillar 40th anniversary campaigns.

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Stephen Fry, Victoria Wood and Christopher Eccleston are to star in an adaptation of Mary Norton's classic children's novel The Borrowers this Christmas.

The 90-minute drama, penned by “Merlin" writer Ben Vanstone and produced by Working Title Television, will be directed by “This Is England"'s Tom Harper for BBC1.

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There is MUCH excitement at Penguin Towers today. Why? Because Penguin Children’s Books won the much-coveted Children’s Publisher of the Year Award at The Bookseller Industry Awards last night. Hooray!

We fought off stiff competition from other big children’s publishers including Walker, Harper Collins, Egmont and Simon & Schuster. It was incredibly tense when we were waiting to hear the result and as you can imagine, it was a jubilant moment when our name was read out . . .

We puffed our feathers with pride when the judges called us ‘the best publisher in the business at the moment’ and it was like a trip down memory lane looking back at all the fun things we achieved last year. Here are a few highlights:

Taking the bestseller charts by storm with Percy Jackson, Diary of a Wimpy Kid, the Top Gear, In the Night Garden, Very Hungry Caterpillar and Peppa Pig annuals, Alice in Wonderland, Artemis Fowl and the Atlantis Complex and Vampire Academy: Last Sacrifice. 

Reaching you in new ways, especially with our groundbreaking new apps for Spot, Peppa Pig and BabyTouch. 

Creating new books and guides ab

Today is an incredibly exciting day. Today is the launch of the Puffin Digital Prize and a brave new world for Puffin picture books. I'm so excited I can hardly breathe. But, I'm getting ahead of myself. Let me take a deep breath and I’ll explain things properly. I'll start at the very beginning . . .

As the Editorial Director of Puffin Picture Books, I am the lucky girl who has the privilege of working on beautifully illustrated, full colour books for young readers. Think Raymond Briggs and The Snowman, add Helen Oxenbury and Julia Donaldson and you get the picture. As I said, I am VERY lucky. But I wasn't feeling quite so lucky a little while ago, when the word digital was a real thorn in my side. How did picture  books fit into this amazing digital world everyone was talking about? Well, quite simply, they didn't. Being full colour with integrated text, the technology simply didn't exist to bring them to life on a digital device. I would enviously look at my fiction colleagues with their e-readers where a whole world of stories lived and breathed in one nifty little machine. Sigh. All I could do was be patient. One day, I said to my beautiful, fully illustrated books, one day, your time will come.

And come it did with a bang - the iPad. Woo-hoo! Like every other person at Penguin, I used all sorts of ruses, good and bad, to get my hands on one. And when I did it felt like Christmas. I've always been a 
book-sniffer (I use that term affectionately, someone who loves a book for being a book as well as a fabulous story) but my conversion was complete in that one moment. Just look at what this thing can do! We have glorious technicolour in fanta

We only have one week left in August, people. ONE WEEK! Oh, the agony…

Here are some things that don’t make me sad.

Marcel the Shell with Shoes On. It might be the most delightful video I’ve ever seen. [Vimeo]

Dinner Party Download needs your help! Because “it’s not really public radio if you don’t beg your listeners for money.” [APM]

Ah, home… This Day in History: Record Setting Tow-Truck Parade Held in Washington State [History Channel]

I’m sure this was staged, but it is delightful. [YouTube]

Cute item of the week: Puffin. [Next Web]

Our colleagues at Oxford Fajar have a treat for you! [Save the Words]

Kindle vs. iPad close-up showdown [Wired]

It’s about time we had a Silly Bandz anthem! [Urlesque]

#EatPrayWhatever [Twitter]

This is one “epic” parking garage. [GalleyCat]

‘Never judge a book by its cover.’ So they say. But whoever they are, I think they are wrong! All books should, and are in the first instance anyway, always be judged by their covers.

Puffin by Design, which publishes today, is full of hundreds of the amazing covers that have been designed over the years. Everyone will have their favourites. Here are some of mine:

      

We all remember the cover that was on a book when we read it, and seeing it again brings back memories. At the beginning of researching Puffin by Design we spent time in Puffin’s archive library, which lives in a huge warehouse in Rugby. We poured over the rows and rows of bookshelves and were constantly shouting out, ‘I remember that one!’, ‘Oh, I LOVED that book!’, and also, ‘OMG, what were they thinking?!’

Do you know where Puffins live or what they like to eat? Learn more about the Puffin at National Geographic Kids Creature Feature, just click here. Print and color in this coloring page and send it to me at [email protected] as a jpeg or pdf and I'll post it on my blog! Happy Coloring!! For more Coloring pages click here.

.... Whose day wouldn't be made by this? Respected editors and sensible copywriters alike flocked the corridors of power to prod and be delighted by this fantastic creature.

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by Carol Foskett Cordsen illustrated by Douglas B. Jones Puffin paperback 2007 Hearkening back to another era, this picture book takes a warm-n-fuzzy look at a day in the life of the old fashioned door-to-door milkman. Told in terse clip-clop rhymes we follow Mr. Plimpton as he readies for and makes his daily deliveries in a town straight out of Robert McCloskey's Centerberg. It begins with

Sometime in 2010 Puffin Books turns 70. This may or may not be the first time anything has been said of the fact, but you can treat it as news nonetheless. The Puffin imprint began in 1940, but perhaps became the kind of imprint that we think of today when in 1961 an incredible editor Kaye Webb worked to transform how Puffin published books. From our online history: Kaye Webb's belief was that children themselves needed a living relationship with books and so in 1967 she created the much-loved Puffin Club, which soon gained tens of thousands of members. "It will make children into readers" she promised Penguin Founder Allen Lane. And (here comes the cliché) the rest is as they say history.

Just last year Penguin celebrated its own 70th. Most probably remember — for some vividly — Penguin's 70th Anniversary Campaign that swept her majesty's kingdom in 2005. The campaign consisted of a special series of 70 short stories (which is currently going for only £50), a V&A exhibit, Penguin by Design by Phil Baines, a biography of Allen Lane and more. But long before any of this celebration took place, Penguin took the anniversary as an opportunity to stop and consider where it was and where it was going. Penguin stopped. Stopped and asked itself hard questions. Who or what is Penguin? What does Penguin mean to Britain or to the world for that matter? Is Penguin more than just books? Was orange the right colour? Was milk really a bad choice? (ok maybe no that last one).

Just yesterday was the first official sit down for Puffin. Publishers and editors, marketers and directors carefully assembled and put down their pointy objects in a gesture of peace, to take a pause and ask those same questions. What does Puffin mean today? What do we want to remember (well, besides all of it)? It could not have come at a better time either. 2006 is looking to be a milestone year of achievement. And while there were plenty of ideas for promos and savvy publishing projects that tell the tale of Puffin while shaking up those dusty bookstore shelves, it was obvious that these questions are not limited to the 9 or so people in the room. Not to mention that I have hardly worked here some 9 months. What do I know?

So I open the question to you. What does Puffin mean to you? What do people remember? Cherish? Judge? Criticise? And what would you like to see us do in 2010? Afterall, like Penguin, Puffin is not a brand that just sits there idly on the shelf. It is a part of us all. Or is it? What say you? And who knows, we might even pilfer your ideas.

Justin Renard, Puffin Marketing Officer