Of Penguins, Albatrosses, Pelicans and Kings: Refugees from Nazism at Penguin Books

To mark the 90th anniversary of the founding of Penguin Books, Dr. Anna Nyburg, author of Émigrés: The Transformation of Art Publishing in Britain (Phaidon, 2014), will pay tribute to the disproportionately large number of former refugees from Nazi Europe who contributed to the company’s extraordinary success.

Penguin Books was founded by Allen Lane in 1935 and would radically change British reading habits, educating, informing  and entertaining the public for generations through their affordable and widely available books.

Right from the beginning, Penguin Books owed a debt to German publishing and book production, inspired as the company was by the then ultra-modern Hamburg-based Albatross Books. Since William Morris’ Kelmscott Press, German and British book producers and designers had influenced each other’s work, with the result that when the National Socialists came to power, those mainly Jewish book artists, designers and authors fleeing to Britain could use their existing contacts in Britain to find work.

Authors such as Stefan Lorant and François Lafitte wrote Penguin Specials while Jan Tschichold and Hans Schmoller oversaw the important typography and page design that signalled the slim volumes’ modernity. Berthold Wolpe, Romek Marber and Germano Facetti created the Penguin covers that helped to sell the books, while Schmoller and Dieter Pevsner (son of Penguin author and editor Nikolaus Pevsner) became major figures in the running of the company. Last but no means least, it was two Viennese refugees, Wolfgang Foges and Walter Neurath (later to co-found Thames & Hudson)  who thought up and created the first King Penguins.

To book, click here

Image: book covers