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1960s penguin book covers

Things magazine..wheew sweet mother! They have put together a kick butt gallery of penguin book covers. Includes beautiful covers overseen by Jan Tschichold as well as the late typographer Hans Schmoller. My favorite years are between 1961-1972 when Italian art director Germano Facetti was in charge of design. Facetti enlisted Polish graphic designer Romek Marber to redesign the look of the Penguin series and the rest is history.

Side note: Watched Jules Dassin’s Brute force last night. Great Flick. I also recommend Riffifi which was directed by Dassin as well.

(via Ace jet 170)

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by Judy Blume original Penguin edition 1972 Where's the struggle, and what's the resolution of that conflict? What does Peter want, exactly? Is Peter even the main character? Everything I learned last week in lectures and workshops is turned upside down! Grad school has ruined reading for me! Okay, I'm calm now. But it is an interesting, if serendipitous, choice for me at this time. These

Or rather, not. One year when I worked as a film reviewer for radio I took it upon myself to put together a year-in-review show that attempted to provide a summary of that year's films using soundbites from my fellow reviewers. I had nearly 60 hours of material to work with and in those analog days of rerecording and literally splicing quarter-inch tape I wound up living in the production

Towards the end of every year I tour the office, brazenly declaring that the next year will undoubtedly be the year of the ebook, so why should 2007 be any different? But this year, there is more and more evidence that the tipping point for digital reading, if not here already, is just around the corner. With this in mind Penguin, like many other big publishers, is getting its As, Bs and Cs converted into ones and zeros and preparing our catalogue for a time when words will be blithely transmitted across the ether to a variety of devices via a variety of services. Our high level digital director this week spent an hour talking to 200 Penguins from around the company explaining where we were going and giving people an idea of the amount of work that lies ahead. To bookend her talk she prepared the two videos below that give very different ideas of what the future of books and reading might look like. I know which view I favour. What about you?

A World without Books

or

The Future's So Bright...

Jeremy Ettinghausen
Digital Publisher

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I remember loving Pippi Longstocking when I was seven or eight years old.  I was a rule-follower, but there was something about Pippi's attitude that absolutely enchanted me.  I loved that she slept with her feet on the pillow.  I loved that she had a monkey for a pet and threw dishes out of a tree.  I loved that she told the teacher exactly what she thought of those math problems with all the apples that came and went so quickly you couldn't keep track of them.

I still love Pippi, and so I was thrilled to see this new translation of Astrid Lindgren's story in a big, beautiful, illustrated package from Penguin.



Pippi's story is the same (happily, no one has gone through to make her more politically correct), and I predict this new translation by Tina Nunnally will be irresistible to young readers.  Lauren Child's illustrations in this oversized hardcover are bright and playful and full of Pippi's spirit.  My six-year-old daughter put a bookmark in this one after breakfast yesterday and said, "I can't read any more right now.  I'm saving the rest."  I understood exactly what she meant. Pippi's stories are worth saving and worth sharing all over again.

I went to visit the Rye Primary school Library Enhancement group last Friday; a great bunch of kids - and needless to say, they all share my passion for books and reading!

They presented me with a poster that will be hung in shop windows in Rye when people borrow a Nim's Island from the school - because they hope that all the families at the school have now had a chance to read Nim's Island together, and are 're now taking the book out to shops and places in town. (How great is it that the school's crest includes a seal?)

I couldn't scan it all in one, but the school's crest hangs down from the book poster.

So last week Facebook announced new models of advertising, including allowing brands and products to create Facebook pages. In the past, one had to be a real person to create a facebook account, but now the spectre of monolithic corporate presence looms large over the booming social networking site.

Penguin (never backward when coming forward) has today become, we believe, the first publisher to take advantage of Facebook's largesse and we've created our own product page which you can find here. We're now busy adding pictures, videos and all sorts of other gubbins to the page to create what we hope will be an interesting, engaging and regularly updated destination for our new fans (brands and companies have fans, not friends, which makes sense really). Let us know what we could put on our page to make it more interesting, either by writing on our wall, or by getting in touch via the comments on this blog, though our myspace page, by IMing our second life avatar, on the podcast, through the website or, if you must, with terribly old fashioned phone, fax, email or snailmail. Phew.

When news of our facebook page rippled through the office reaction was mixed, ranging from total disinterest, (very) mild excitement to deep mistrust. The last response came from our most enthusiastic facebookers who feel that a company has no place muscling in on a social networking site. Facebook is a place where friends can hang with friends, tag each other in photos and catch up on news of bawdy nights out (rest assured, you will not see pictures of Penguin, passed out in a shopping trolley after one too many Moscow Mules). I was reminded from a passage from All Tomorrow's Parties where William Gibson disects the disappearance of geographic bohemias:

"Bohemias. Alternative subcultures. They were a crucial aspect of industrial civilization in the two previous centuries. They were where industrial civilization went to dream. A sort of unconscious R&D, exploring alternate societal strategies ... But they became extinct.”
“Extinct?”
“We started picking them before they could ripen. A certain crucial growing period was lost, as marketing evolved and the mechanisms of recommodification became quicker, more rapacious. Authentic subcultures required backwaters, and time, and there are no more backwaters. They went the way of geography in general..."

So, sorry if we are treading on your toes. We honestly won't get in your way and, after all, you don't have to be our friend, or our fan, or our follower or part of our gang. But, if you want to stay in touch, we hope to make it as easy as possible for you to find us, and connect with us, our authors and their books and other readers.

Jeremy Ettinghausen
Digital Publisher

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Last week, I posted books from Wordsong that remain unnominated for Poetry Cybils.  This week, I headed over to Houghton Mifflin/Clarion/Harcourt, and I'm so happy to say that all the children's poetry books I found there have already been nominated.

So I went to Dial and ended up exploring the Penguin Group website. Here are the two books I found there that have not been nominated:

I Don't Want To Clean My Room: A Mess of Poems About Chores, by Hope Vestergaard

Shout!: Little Poems that Roar, by Brod Bagert


And here are the Wordsong titles that remain unnominated:

Miss Crandall's School for Young Ladies and Little Misses of Color, by Elizabeth Alexander and Marilyn Nelson

Shape Me a Rhyme, by Jane Yolen

Under the Kissletoe, by J. Patrick Lewis

Bugs, by David L. Harrison

Polar Bear, Arctic Hare, by Eileen Spinelli


Have you read and enjoyed any of the above poetry titles? If so, and if you haven't used your Poetry nomination yet, please consider nominating one. The Poetry nomination pool is still pretty small!

What about your other Cybils nominations? If you haven't gotten to it yet, there are only a few weeks left. Please nominate your favorites now.  We want to consider a wide range of titles in every category! Thanks.
 

An Illustrated Memoir by Ann Marie Fleming Riverhead Books / Penguin 2007 Ann Marie Fleming's great-grandfather was Long Tack Sam, one of the great international magicians of the late 19th and early 20th century. Growing up Marie had heard many casual references to her great-grandfather but there was little real information to go on. With members of her family spread across the

by Herodotus, aka Cicero Father of History Penguin Great Journeys series 2007 While on my recent travels I stumbled onto a couple new series put out by Penguin books, smartly packaged 120 page excerpts from the various titles in their Classics backlist. In the Great Loves series they include ruminations on love from writers as varied as Virgil, Casanova, Freud, Nin and Updike. They've also

Throughout the novel Huckleberry Finn tells a series of lies about his family. For example, he tells the woman who feeds him in Chapter 11 that his name is “Sarah Williams” and that his/her “mother’s down sick, and out of money and everything…” (52).

Later, in Chapter 16 Huck leads two men in a skiff on the river to believe that he is traveling with his family and that they are sick with small-pox. “…because it’s pap that’s there, and maybe you’d help me tow the raft ashore where the light is. He’s sick–and so is mam and Mary Ann” (83).

What do these series of lies reveal? (more…)

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I spent much of yesterday doing something a publisher should never have to do - buying skin for an author in preparation for an book launch. But when this event takes place in the virtual world of Second Life and when the author is William Gibson, normal publishing activity leaps out of the window.

The author of Neuromancer, Pattern Recognition and the just released Spook Country has legions of fans in Second Life and four hours before the event they had began to gather to await his arrival. Indeed so many arrived early that William Gibson himself could not get into the sim (the virtual space where the event was taking place) leading to a brief evacuation to allow the author to sneak in through the virtual fire escape. And then we were reminded that Second Life is still very much a world in its infancy by a video which failed to play - hopefully not too many were disappointed by seeing the quicktime logo for a few minutes!

But when William Gibson took to the stage, descending from the heavens in a customized shipping container, everything came good. He read from the opening portion of Spook Country and answered a series of very fine questions from the audience who hung onto his every word. Audio was beamed in from the MDM campus in Vancouver to the riversrunred studios in London, and out to Second Life. What made me happy about this event was that it gave people from all over the world a chance to be in the same space as one of their favourite authors, and during the event I was receiving goodwill messages from people thrilled to see him.

Should he return to Second Life he will find lots of friends, old and new, and I guess that this is what virtual worlds and social marketing is really all about.

Jeremy Ettinghausen, Digital Publisher

PS Pics, audio and video from the event will be available very soon and there is a nice piece about it here.

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Today is a momentous day for us here at Penguin Towers - today we announce to the world that BOND IS BACK.

It's been a closely guarded secret here for a little while, but thankfully the time has come that we can reveal to all that in May 2008, Penguin UK will be publishing the next literary instalment in the glorious tradition of Ian Fleming's most famous double 0 agent.

And so, we bring you DEVIL MAY CARE - the new James Bond novel. Most excitingly of all - I can tell you now that the author of this next instalment is one of the true greats of British writing ... Sebastian Faulks...

Famed for his "French Trilogy" (The Girl at the Lion D'Or, Birdsong, and Charlotte Gray), and more recently for Human Traces and Engleby - Sebastian has for the last twenty years reached out to readers with his masterful prose, his meticulous eye for detail and setting, and his exceptional ability to make his characters transcend the limits of the page. And now he is applying his style and skill to writing the next chapter in the life of our favourite spy - Bond, James Bond.

Picking up exactly where Fleming left off, DEVIL MAY CARE is set during the height of the Cold War, the action played out in exotic locations across the world - and it seems Sebastian very much enjoyed getting into the swing of things:

“In his house in Jamaica, Ian Fleming used to write a thousand words in the morning, then go snorkelling, have a cocktail, lunch on the terrace, more diving, another thousand words in late afternoon, then more Martinis and glamorous women. In my house in London, I followed this routine exactly, apart from the cocktails, the lunch and the snorkelling.”

I can't reveal too much about the book at this stage - you'll have to wait until next May I'm afraid - but believe me - it really will be worth it. DEVIL MAY CARE has everything one could possibly ask from a James Bond novel, everything one could possibly ask from Sebastian Faulks' writing, and most of all, it's a bloody good thriller. I promise you all - you're in for a real treat.

For more information - please visit www.Penguin007.com

Alex Clarke - Senior Editor

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Generally, I would describe myself as an early-adopter - I like the shiny shiny new things, whether they be gadgets or cool websites or even chocolate bars with 'New!' in a starburst. I appreciate that this can sometimes make me the internet cafe equivalent of a pub-bore, but it is the way I was programmed...

So I can't really explain why it has taken me so long to create a facebook account - but three days in, I just don't get it. I've registered, uploaded my addressbook, been friended (but not 'poked' yet), added a couple of widgets and, er, what now? My virtual friends can contact me by a number of ways, through Twitter or Second Life and my Real Life (or 'meatspace') friends often know my actual address and even sometimes my phone number! So what do I get out of Facebook? Emails telling me that someone has sent me a message? Just send me the message already! The chance to participate in the 'How do you like your chocolate chip cookie?' Poll of the day? (I prefer a Ginger Nut). I also was struck by Jason Kottke's post about open Vs closed networks - he describes Facebook as an intranet - surely less interesting than the internet itself.

So come on - am I doing something wrong? Have I missed a trick? How do I connect with books and with readers and with authors? Am I just suffering from social network overload and is it affecting my job? Am I simply too old? Let me know your thoughts, here, there or other places entirely - if I don't find something good soon my facebook account will join http://myspace.com/jeremyet in a pretty short list of deleted web services.

Jeremy Ettinghausen, Digital Publisher

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San Francisco, Menlo Park, Palo Alto, Stanford, Mountain View, Sunnyvale, San Jose. For a student of the history of technology (ie total geek) as the Caltrain rolls through these stations thoughts of dotcom glories past and present are evoked. One can't help look at ones fellow passengers and wonder who is the google millionaire and which younger, hungrier buck dreams of usurping him.

All of which is a roundabout way of saying that I am excited to be in San Jose, California for the O'Reilly Tools of Change conference, which (starting in about five hours) will be looking at the ways that book publishing and technology are intersecting now, and the future of this sometimes happy, sometimes not, relationship.

Perusing the agenda there is lots of stuff to look forward to, but the publisher - rather than the geek - in me, was also looking forward to meeting some fellow publishers for a gossip and an exchange of views on the issues raised by the conference. But apart from the odd exception (Random House are here in numbers!) there are almost no book publishers here! What is going on? Am I at the wrong conference? Is it that the conference is in California, rather than New York, that has kept others away? Or is it, as a book blogger suggested to me in the bar, that publishers 'just don't get technology', and don't think they need to? Hopefully I'll find out the answers to these questions and more over the next couple of days.

Jeremy Ettinghausen, Digital Publisher

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Rebecca OUP-US

We have a lot of debate at OUP about the type of web presence authors should have. There is no definitive answer, since the web is still one big experiment but over at the Penguin UK blog, Colin Brush has taken a serious look at the issues.

Which makes me wonder, what author blogs do you read? (more…)

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The Puzzling World of Winston Breen by Eric Berlin. G.P. Putnam’s Sons (a division of Penguin). $16.99.

I'm going to be honest here. Mr. Eric Berlin is no stranger to me. In 2006-07 he served on the judging committee of the Cybil Award's Middle Grade Novel category. He has a blog of note and I often steal his postings when they're particularly choice. It would logical for you to think then that because of all this I might be more inclined to like his book than I would that of your average anonymous joe. As far as I've been able to ascertain, however, the opposite is more often true. I have a very very hard time reviewing the books of anyone I've come into contact with. Certain authors and illustrators may publish and publish until they're old and grey but if I know them personally and don't think their work is superb, I will not immediately. A book must actually be good, if I know its creator beforehand. Hence, the following.

When adults start reminiscing about the books of their youth, they can grow eloquent in their praise. Amusingly, when those same adults starts comparing said books to the ones coming out today, they are in very great danger of suddenly contracting a case of Old Fogeyism. “Why when I was a kid we had GOOD mysteries. With lots of clues and puzzles and clever dialogue. We had ‘The Westing Game’!” (slams down cane) “I’d like to see you whippersnappers come up with a book like that today. Hah!” If that sounds like you (or, rather, the 108-year-old part of you that comes to life whenever the subject of “kids today” crops up) then I have good news. It's good news for actual honest-to-goodness child readers as well, now that I think about it. First-time newbie kidlit book author Eric Berlin (a crossword creator for The New York Times) is a fan of puzzles. Such a fan, in fact, that he’s worked them into the narrative of, “The Puzzling World of Winston Breen.” You have an old-fashioned treasure hunt on the one hand, puzzles galore on the other, and some fun dialogue, memorable characters, and an action sequence or two just for spice. Hard to resist.

Twelve-year-old Winston isn't like a lot of other kids out there. He loves him his puzzles. Mind games, riddles, crosswords, you name it. So it was only logical that when his little sister Katie discovered a hidden puzzle in the old antique box he bought her, she thought he put it in there on purpose. The two siblings soon learn, though, that there's more to these three wooden pieces than immediately meets the eye as they find themselves involved in a real life treasure hunt. Glenville's richest resident Walter Fredericks died years ago, and now his puzzles have reemerged. That means that Winston and Katie need to solve some puzzles alongside an ex-cop, a librarian, two untrustworthy hooligans, and a news reporter. The only problem is, someone else wants the reward at the end of this game. Someone who's willing to do almost anything to get it. Along the way, readers can solve puzzles alongside Winston, checking their answers in the back of the book.

I liked how the novel framed the book in such a way that Winston was trying to puzzle out the real life mystery (i.e. Who broke into a local librarian's home and threatened her?) alongside the real puzzles. It's kind of a pity that Winston doesn't figure out the villains before they reveal themselves. It's always good to have a proactive protagonist. Berlin makes up for this missing piece though by then allowing his hero the chance to solve the book's central mystery instead. Still, the last line of the book would have made a little more sense if Winston exhibited crime-solving as well as puzzle-solving skills. I do love that this is a book that requires that kids get actively invested. Besides the puzzles themselves, Berlin foreshadows his action nicely with a newspaper article near the beginning of the book that mentions various robberies that later turn out to be our villain's work. And I’m pleased to say that I didn’t see the real villain of this book coming until it was too too late. I don’t know if Mr. Berlin means to lead you astray, but a guy who can fool a child and an adult reader has his elements firmly in place.

Berlin's particularly good at keeping potentially dark elements kid-friendly. At one point the local librarian has an out-and-out breakdown when Winston shows her something by accident. But how do you justify that kind of a reaction without suggesting that the victim (in this case, a librarian) has had something terrible happen to her. Berlin instead explains that it would be easy to harass someone. "Phone calls in the middle of the night, notes left in the mailbox, perhaps a stone tossed through a window. Small, nasty things that individually would mean little, but taken all together could make someone very afraid." It's a clever way to convey darker elements without compromising the appropriateness of the narrative.

Now the stats. Total number of puzzles/riddles I successfully solved in this book: 3. Not that I tried to do every single one, but of the ones that I did try, I only got three. I liked the sheer variety of puzzles in this book, to be honest with you. Some are skewed easy and some are skewed very very hard. One puzzle on page 68 is "explained" in the back of the book, but the explanation ends up being just as difficult to understand as the original question itself. Still, the thing about the book is that it has something for everyone. True puzzle fans will be adequately challenged and for those kids who don't know the answers immediately there's at least one or two they might be able to stumble through. It's funny to say, but this book awakened a kind of visceral thrill whenever I flipped to the back to read the solution to one question or another. It was as if I was reading an old Encyclopedia Brown novel, with the answers just waiting to be looked at in the back. Visceral thrills such as this are not cheap.

Berlin's careful with his details too. It used to be that a villain could kidnap a hero and you'd truly feel the kid was in dire straits. Now we live in a cell phone age. Some authors ignore the contraptions. Others work solely in the genre of historical fiction. A cell phone is a recipe for disaster when it comes to dramatic tension. That's why clever authors work them into the plots, flukes, flaws, and all. For example, at one point Winston is in a bit of a pickle and he manages to get his hands on a cell. Unfortunately, he's underground at this point and that means he's not getting any reception. Slick storytelling uses these kinds of complications to their advantage.

A librarian’s motto mimics that of a Boy Scout. We try to be prepared. If someone comes up to me and asks for books that are similar to their favorites, I need to have a complex array of smart sounding titles in mind to recommend instantaneously. And until this moment in time I was empty in a particular area. If someone, a fan of Ellen Raskin’s, “The Westing Game”, came up to me and asked for similar books, I would have been stumped. Stumped and perhaps inclined against my will to recommend “Chasing Vermeer”. Berlin’s book maybe isn’t on the same level as Raskin’s, but it’s probably more fun to read anyway. Clever kids will adore it. Mediocre kids will enjoy the treasure hunt. And those children that only like non-fiction reads will probably skip all the narration and just solve the puzzles. Nothing wrong with that. This book offers quite a lot to an array of different readers. Definitely worth a peek.

On shelves September 20th.

Notes On the Cover: I'm going to give a thumbs up to this one. You may remember that artist Adam McCauley did the new Wayside School covers, so this seems an appropriate match. He's worked in elements of the book that are consistent with the narrative. Interestingly enough, I'm having a bit of trouble with the title, and I think I've pinpointed why. The phrase "The Puzzling World of Winston Breen" is not dissimilar from "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty". Which means that when I'm discussing this book in polite society, I have a tendency to refer to Winston as Walter. But that's just me.

Other Reviews By: Jen Robinson's Book Page.

by Kevin Sherry
Dial/Penguin 2007

Spoiler alert: Honestly, I feel it's a bit much to forewarn of a spoiler on a picture book, but when I picked this jolly little thing up I wasn't prepared for the twist and actually laughed. out. loud. If you would like a chance at the same ignore this review right now and go check it out for yourself. I'm not saying you will find it as funny as I did, only that I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have laughed if I'd known where this story was headed. The spoiler comes after the illustration below.

Shall we proceed?

The giant blue Squid, presented in huge cartoon-y close-ups, very dramatically announces what we pretty much know: that s/he is big. Squid then goes about bragging about all the other creatures in the ocean that s/he is bigger than. Bigger than shrimp. Bigger than clams. Bigger than jellyfish and turtles. Bigger than this fish, and that fish and this and that fish.

At last, like Leonardo DiCaprio in Titanic, Squid calls down the wrath of fate by announcing that s/he is the biggest thing in the ocean.

























At which point Squid is swallowed by a whale.

Poor Squid. A quick inventory of the whale's belly shows Squid in good company, surrounded by all the other creatures of the sea. In the end Squid perks up and his last words are presented in a word balloon coming from the belly of the whale leaping from the water.

"I'm the biggest thing inside this whale!"

Any fan of Lane Smith's The Happy Hocky Family might recognize the optimism of Baby Hocky in Squid's final declaration. Or perhaps it's the brighter side of a superiority complex.

There's a note in the back where the artist claims to have sandwiched watercolor backgrounds, paper cut-outs and ink lined drawings between sheets of glass for the final effect, which seems like the hard way to do what a lot of Photoshop effects can accomplish. Then again, it does have a very organic feel and I wouldn't be surprised if that was Sherry's method, though I sincerely doubt his claim that the glass was pried from old pirate ships and the ink is 100% squid.

Sherry is something of a youngster. At 24 he's the youngest author signed to Dial with a three-book contract. I pulled this article while trying to find out more about him. He seems like one of those nice young talented kids who make things look effortless. I'm going to let my jealousy go with this one and just enjoy it.