Penguin Books

    I see now that it has been over a dozen days since I wrote anything and that means the weather has been good. My last post was about an old friend, Graham Murray, and at the end of it I mentioned that he used to order books for us from the U.K. Many of them were Penguins or Pelicans, but we were younger then and had no need for Puffins for the children yet to come.

   A good description of what resulted from such acquisitions is provided by Penelope Lively. Apart from offering a peek at her library, she also mentions the child-rearing advice offered by one author and laments the loss of many of her books.

"Perhaps my most treasured shelves are those with the old blue Pelicans, over fifty paperbacks, including some seminal titles: F.R. Leavis’s "The Great Tradition," Margaret Mead’s "Growing Up in New Guinea," Richard Hoggart’s "The Uses of Literacy," Richard Titmuss’s "The Gift Relationship." And John Bowlby’s "Child Care and the Growth of Love," which had us young mothers of the midcentury in a fever of guilt if we handed our young children over to someone else for longer than an hour or so lest we risked raising a social psychopath – even the father was considered an inadequate stand-in. Pelicans were the thinking person’s library – for 3 shillings and 6 pence you opened the mind a little further. And Penguin had of course their own flamboyant Dewey system – the splendid color-coding: orange for fiction, green for crime, dark blue for biography and cherry red for travel.
I don’t have enough old Penguins. The Pelicans have survived, but the rest have mostly disappeared – read until in bits, perhaps, of left on beaches or in trains or loaned and not returned. And long gone are the days when a paperback publisher could confidently market a product with no image at all on the cover – just the title and the author’s name, emphatically lettered. Beautiful."

   When I last saw Graham he still had many books spread throughout the house where they are cared for by his wife who, you will be glad to know, appreciates them as much as he did. 

Sources:
  The quotation from Lively is found in: Dancing Fish and Amonites: A Memoir, pp.187-188.
   About Penguin Books you can easily find a lot. Up at Western Libraries there are these four books and more:
Baines, Phil. Penguin By Design: A Cover Story, 1935- 2005.
DBWSTK Z271.3.B65 B35 2005.
Greene, Evelyne. Penguin Books: The Pictorial Cover, 1960-1980, 
Storage: Z121.G726 1981
Morpurgo, J.E. Alan Lane: King Penguin - A Biography
Storage: Z325.L247M67 1979
Wooten, William & George Donaldson. Reading Penguin: A Critical Anthology
DBWSTK Z325.P42R433 2013.
Western Libraries even has a lot of Puffin Books which was the children's imprint of Penguin books. For the reason why Western University Libraries has so much "Kiddie Lit" see this post about Landmark Books.
Here is another description of the colours of the various genres:

Orange = General Fiction (F)
Green = Mystery and Crime (C)
Cerise = Travel and Adventure (T)
Dark Blue = Biography (B)
Grey = World Affairs (W)
Violet = Essays and Belles Lettres (E)
Red = Plays (P)
Yellow = Miscellaneous Penguins (M)

If you are really interested in Penguins, see: Penguin First Editions.

The Bonus: The "Penguincubator."

In 1937, "Allen Lane launched the "Penguincubator", a Penguin pocket book vending machine, which he installed in a busy street in London. By inserting 6 pence you choose and receive your book, or better, several books, as the small text under the photo indicates: "Some ingenious people noticed that a clever manipulation of the buttons of the machine made it possible to receive a pretty quantity of books beyond the 6 pence inserted. Lane hopes further testing will create a thug resistant machine".

From: "A Short History of Book Covers -3/4" Grapheine, July 12, 2017.