Penguins were and are paperbacks.  In Britain, the two words used to be almost tautologous.  The whole point of Penguins was always that they were paperbacks, at a cheap price, but still with a certain air of quality about them.  To start with they were all reprints too – books that had already been published in hardback by another publisher, and Penguin bought only the paperback rights.

So what is this?  A hardback published by Penguin, and one that is making the opposite journey – having already been published in paperback.

The story really goes back to the creation of Pelican Books in 1937 as a non-fiction imprint of Penguin.  Pelican number one – Bernard Shaw’s ‘The intelligent woman’s guide to Socialism, Capitalism, Sovietism and Fascism’ was essentially a reprint of a book that had been published in hardback in 1928.  But it had two new chapters written specially for the Pelican edition – in one sense Penguin’s first steps into publishing new material.  Volume 6 of the Pelican series, ‘Practical Economics’ by G.D.H. Cole, actually published at the same time, was though a complete new work specially written for the series and really the first new work published by Penguin. Cole was a distinguished economist and a prominent socialist, although in the end perhaps better known for the detective stories he wrote with his wife Margaret (as G.D.H & M. Cole).

From then on, driven by Pelican and by the Penguin Specials, Penguin very quickly moved to the point where by 1941 they were publishing more new works than reprints and that continued throughout the rest of the war years. This created a long list of works for which Penguin effectively held the hardback rights, or at least had first refusal on them.  The launch of Penguin Classics, with E.V. Rieu’s translation of ‘The Odyssey’ in January 1946 added further works to this list. The original texts of the Penguin Classics were long out of copyright, but the translations had been commissioned by Penguin.

The authors of these new works and the translators of the Classics were no doubt proud to see their works published in Penguin paperbacks. It guaranteed them relatively high sales, far higher than would typically be achieved by a scholarly work first published in hardback, as well as a certain national prominence. It was an honour to be a Penguin author. But paperbacks, even Penguins, were flimsy things, essentially transient and impermanent, often treated with little respect and starting to disintegrate after any significant use. In comparison, for an author to see his or her work published in hardback, ensured a sort of literary permanence, even if sales were relatively low. What author didn’t want to hold a hardbound copy of their own work in their hands or to see it on the shelf?

So most authors of new works first published in Penguin would probably have been keen to see a hardback edition, even if the payment they received was relatively low. Penguin too may have been seduced by the idea of the greater prestige that came from hardback publication. Hardbacks potentially offered higher margins and higher royalties for the author per copy than paperbacks did, but the number of copies sold would be much lower and sales first had to reach a certain minimum level before there were any positive margins at all. In order to reach this minimum level, most hardback publications had the benefit of at least 6 to 12 months of sales, often much longer, before they had to compete with cheaper paperback editions. Hardback copies of books first published as paperbacks, would not have that luxury. They would be sold alongside the paperback alternative right from the start.

So perhaps tentatively at first, Penguin took the plunge into hardback publishing in 1951 with the first five titles in a new series to be known as Bound Penguins. There were two Pelicans, H.D.F. Kitto’s ‘The Greeks’ (Pelican A220) and ‘Buddhism’ by Christmas Humphreys (Pelican A228), both new titles that had appeared in paperback earlier that year, and two Penguin Classics, Rieu’s ‘Odyssey’ (Penguin L1) and J.M. Cohen’s translation of ‘Don Quixote’ (Penguin L10). ‘Don Quixote’ was a recent paperback publication, but ‘The Odyssey’ had already achieved very large paperback sales in the five years since its first publication, as had the fifth book ‘A dictionary of Science’ by Uvarov & Chapman (Penguin R1), first published in 1943.

The books were promoted in a leaflet sent out with issue 14 of Penguins Progress. A promotional photo showed the first five volumes without their dustwrappers alongside a single copy with dustwrapper and a very 1950s looking table lamp. By showing them without dustwrappers, the photo makes clear that the bindings are colour coded – green for Pelicans, red for Penguin Classics and blue for Reference Books. The dustwrappers do have the same colour coding, but it’s much more discreet and wouldn’t have been very obvious in a shop display, which rather undermines the point of it. The titles and authors’ names are coloured as is the small Penguin logo on the spine, but otherwise the dustwrappers are in a standard lined design in browny-grey.

The books are of standard Penguin size, but printed on higher quality paper. Four of the initial five books were priced at 6 shillings, in comparison with the paperback versions that I think would have been one shilling and six pence at the time. The much longer Don Quixote, with over 900 pages, was priced at 10 shillings and six pence in hardback, but five shillings in paperback.

Another five titles followed, although which titles they were to be seems to have been constantly changing. The dustwrappers of the first titles announced that ‘The archaeology of Palestine’ by W.F. Albright (Pelican A199) would be in the next group, but by the time the promotional leaflet was issued, that had changed to ‘Justinian and his age’ by P.N. Ure (Pelican A217). Both dustwrappers and leaflet announced Apuleius’s ‘The Golden Ass’ translated by Robert Graves (Penguin Classics L11) and ‘A dictionary of pyschology’ by James Drever (Penguin Reference R5), but neither were in the next batch. Graves and Drever did eventually see their work published in Bound Penguin, but Albright got no satisfaction in that respect.

The pattern of issuing batches of five titles at a time continued for a while, but then gradually broke down, although the general mix of titles from the Pelican and Penguin Classics lists, with the odd reference book thrown in, remained fairly constant. By the time Penguin issued its Autumn 1952 Classified List, the number of Bound Penguins issued, or shortly to be issued, was approaching 40. It was probably also by that time clear though, that sales were not going as well as had been hoped. Selling hardbound books alongside paperback copies of the same titles at sometimes a quarter of the price, turned out to be quite hard. The flurry of new Bound Penguins in 1952 was followed by none at all in 1953 and only a handful in 1954.

Meanwhile the stock of existing titles was taking a long time to shift. Even by Penguin’s 1958 Classified List, over 20 of the Bound Penguins were still available. So far as I can tell, only one of them, Rieu’s translation of The Odyssey, was ever reprinted, so they were sitting around as old stock for a long time.

There was though one offshoot of the series that seems to have been more successful. That was the hardback editions of the ‘Buildings of England’ series, edited by Nikolaus Pevsner, which started off as Bound Penguins, but went on to establish a life of their own and are still published today, although no longer by Penguin.

The first two Bound Penguins from the Buildings of England Series appeared in late 1952 (BE3 – Middlesex and BE6 – London except the Cities of London and Westminster). They were followed by three others in Bound Penguin format in 1954, but after that they effectively became a series in their own right. The second London volume covering the cities of London and Westminster was published in a Bound Penguin style binding in 1957, presumably to match with the binding of the first London volume, but its dustwrapper reflected the Buildings of England branding rather than that of Bound Penguins. Three other late Bound Penguins (‘The four gospels’, published in 1952, ‘Primitive Art’ by Leonhard Adam, published in 1954 and ‘Grasses’ by C.E. Hubbard, published 1954) also appeared with non-standard dustwrappers, as the series effectively ran down.

Only one main series Penguin ever appeared in the series (they had after all almost always already appeared in hardback editions before being published by Penguin), but volume 763 – Four English Comedies, edited by J.M. Morrell, contained 17th and 18th century plays that were long out of copyright and so could and did appear in the series.

My own collection of Bound Penguins, which included all the volumes I know about with the exception of Voltaire’s ‘Candide’ (Penguin Classic L4), was donated to the Penguin archive at Bristol University a few years ago, together with other Penguin hardbacks.