#penguin-books — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #penguin-books, aggregated by home.social.
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Is this John Wyndham's masterpiece? An astounding book!
#JohnWyndham #TheMidwichCuckoos #Sci-fi #Sciencefiction #SF #Penguinbooks #sciencefictionbooks #Britishsciencefiction
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While rereading John Wyndham's The Day of the Triffids, I re-watched the 1981 TV series. While I was as underwhelmed by the series as I was in 1981, the book remains a classic, but did the illustrator actually read the book's description of the triffids?
#JohnWyndham #TheDayoftheTriffids #Sci-fi #Sciencefiction #SF #Penguinbooks #sciencefictionbooks #booksky #Britishsciencefiction
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After re-watching the 3 Chocky TV series, I re-read John Wyndham's book. He really was a phenomenal writer. The first series is faithful to the book. The second, expands the story very well. The third series is a letdown. It is generic children's sci-fi, very badly miscast and derailed by sidelining the main character who underpinned the whole story.
#JohnWyndham #Chocky #Sci-fi #Sciencefiction #SF #Penguinbooks #sciencefictionbooks #Britishsciencefiction
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Just laid hands on this beautiful hard cover book
*India’s Forests* : Revisiting Nature and History
A compilation of essays from some very cool researchers & writers with a foreword by an amazing historian Dr Shekhar Pathak, while the editors, Arupjyoti Saikia & Mahesh Rangarajan have a rich history of great writing as well.
Looking forward to reading this
https://www.penguin.co.in/book/indias-forests
#books #IndiasNature #Forests #Essays #history #environment #Communities #Ecology #PenguinBooks #Culture
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#1199 Thor Heyerdahl - Aku-Aku: The Secret of Easter Island. Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, 1976, 1st Penguin edition, 6th reprint.
#ThorHeyerdahl #PenguinBooks #EasterIsland #RapaNui #Megaliths #Archaeology #BookOfTheDay
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#1172 Denys Val Baker (ed) - Cornish Short Stories. Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, 1976, 1st edition.
#DenysValBaker #PenguinBooks #Cornwall #JackClemo #DaphneDuMaurier #WinstonGraham #CharlesCausley #ALRowse #BookOfTheDay
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I have a front-of-catalog book coming out this spring with #PenguinBooks and MIT.
Famous professors try to sleep with 14 year old girls.
I'm asked to exhume a famous corpse.
A 12-year-old is stolen, the world's oldest man is debunked, and a CIA bloke accuses us of being Kremlin spies in #WaPo.
People die.
It's a non-fiction book.
You might be in it. Oxford, Stanford, Harvard, and Cambridge professors are in it. Billionaires you know are in it, too.
Order it now.
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At The Yard, Salisbury — A Morning with Penguins
HOW PENGUIN BOOKS GOT ITS NAME — AND STARTED A PUBLISHING REVOLUTION
At the Yard, Salisbury, A Morning with PenguinsIt was a bright August morning when we wandered into The Yard, a tucked-away coffee shop in Salisbury that felt like a secret shared among friends. The scent of espresso mingled with freshly baked muffins, and the walls featured book covers — rows of orange, blue, and green Penguins, those timeless companions of readers everywhere.
At the Yard, Salisbury, A Morning with PenguinsAs we sipped our coffee (and yes, the hot chocolate was extraordinary), I remembered a story that began nearly a century ago — one that changed how the world reads.
At the Yard, Salisbury, A Morning with PenguinsIn 1935, Allen Lane, managing editor at The Bodley Head, stood on a train platform in Exeter after visiting Agatha Christie. Searching for a good-quality paperback for his journey back to London, he found only cheap, flimsy magazines. That moment sparked an idea that would transform publishing: books should be both affordable and beautifully made — quality literature priced like a daily newspaper.
Lane envisioned a series of paperbacks that would bring fine writing to everyone, sold not just in bookshops but in railway stations and corner stores. A young secretary, Joan Coles, suggested the name ‘Penguin,’ friendly and memorable. Lane sent 21-year-old artist Edward Young to the London Zoo to sketch the bird that would become one of the most beloved emblems in publishing history.
What many readers don’t realize is that the earliest Penguins were colour-coded — a design both simple and brilliant. Each colour represented a different genre: orange for fiction, dark blue for biography, red for drama, green for crime, black for serious non-fiction, purple for essays, and grey for world affairs. Together they formed a mosaic of modern reading — bright, confident, and accessible. When we looked at the colourful covers on The Yard’s walls, we were really looking at the visual history of how reading became democratic.
The literary establishment was scandalized. Serious literature, sold beside the morning paper? But readers had the final word. Hemingway, Christie, and Maurois found new homes in satchels and coat pockets across Britain. Within a year, millions of Penguins were in circulation — proof that good books belong to everyone.
As I looked at those covers in The Yard, I realized that the Penguin revolution wasn’t just about paperbacks. It was about trust — the belief that ordinary people deserved access to extraordinary ideas.
At the Yard, Salisbury, A Morning with PenguinsIn a quiet corner of Salisbury, over coffee and conversation, I was reminded that revolutions don’t always begin with noise. Sometimes, they start with a small bird and a bold idea.
Until the next page,
Rebecca
#books #PenguinBooks #RebeccaSReadingRoom #Salisbury #TheBodleyHead
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📚💡💬 | #CurrentlyReading: „Dead and Alive (Essays)“ (Penguin Books, 2025) by the great Zadie Smith
#essays #bibliophilia #foodforthought #zadiesmith #penguinbooks #books #book #booklover #newbook
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My copy of the 1938 Penguin Books edition of 'The Centaur' by Algernon Blackwood. I'm rather pleased to own a 1930s Penguin, especially one by a favourite author. #BookChatWeekly #PenguinBooks #AlgernonBlackwood #paperbacks #fantasyfiction
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Penguin Books are always a joy. Here are my 1960 editions of 'Quatermass II' and 'Quatermass And The Pit' teleplays. Both absolute classics, but I don't need to tell anyone that. The cover designs are by Nigel Kneale's brother Bryan. The first had a plain cover. #PenguinBooks #BookChatWeekly #scifi
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My 1969 Penguin edition of 'Conjure Wife', Fritz Leiber's highly original novel about the wives of academics at a university using #witchcraft to further their husbands' careers. First published in 1953. #31DaysOfHalloween #BookChatWeekly #penguinbooks #vintagepaperbacks #Penguin
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#1073 Jean-Paul Sartre - Nausea. Penguin Books Ltd, Harmondsworth, 1970, 1st Penguin edition, 4th reprint.
#JeanPaulSartre #PenguinBooks #Philosophy #Existentialism #BookOfTheDay
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#923 Philip Ziegler - The Black Death. Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, 1984, 1st edition, reprint of reissue. #PhilipZiegler #PenguinBooks #Plague #Epidemics #Medieval #BookOfTheDay
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I recently enjoyed Edith Wharton's "The Custom of the Country". With its settings in the US and France, this 1913 work bears some thematic resemblance to the international novels of Henry James. Wharton's work, though, does not foreshadow the modernist use of stream of consciousness as does the later work of James; stylistically, Wharton is working with in the tradition of realism, so that one can associate her with William Dean Howells as much as with James.
Writing in this realist tradition and, as one might expect from the author of a pioneering work on interior decoration, scrutinizing in detail dwellings and their contents, Wharton narrates the merciless struggle of midwestern transplant to New York Undine Spragg for upward social mobility. Architecture, furnishings, decor, dress, and accessories not only reflect social and psychological states but also serve to pivot the plot.
I suspect Americans and Europeans, men and women, and young and old will react variously to the novel. I was impressed by its shrewd observation of manners and mores, impressed by its wit and irony, and gripped by the narrative of the odious protagonist's irrepressible social ascent. I remember reading somewhere that "Downton Abbey" creator and beneficiary of a Conservative title hand-out Julian Fellowes was rooting for Undine all the way; that tells us as much about Tory peers as Wharton's work.
I bought the Penguin Classics edition, pictured in this post. I recommend purchasing another edition, as pages fell out of this brand new book as if it were a cheap pulp paperback of old. What a disappointment!
#TheCustomOfTheCountry #EdithWharton #Realism #Books #AmericanLiterature #USLiterature #Novels #Bookstodon #LiteratureInEnglish #PenguinBooks
#InternationalNovels