Until a couple of days ago, Keir Hardie had no idea how many Penguin books he owned. For years he'd been collecting them informally, picking up a few at a time at second-hand shops. "Like a lot of fans, I grew up in a house with Penguin Books on the shelves," he wrote in an e-mail this week, from his home in Inverness, Scotland. It was the books' iconic design, he explained, that first grabbed his eye. "There was never much of a pattern to anything else, but the uniformity of the Penguins made them stand out."
About five years ago, his interest intensified when he walked into his girlfriend's new apartment and saw her shelves loaded with Penguins. "We were both egged on by the sight of each other's juicy collections." This week, prompted by a curious reporter, he finally did a rough count of his Penguins and found they numbered easily more than 1,000. "Quite a shock!" he admitted.
Mr. Hardie is not alone: There is a Penguin Collectors Society whose members hold annual meetings to discuss their obsession. The publisher's iconic design elements have spawned a small housewares line in the U.K. that includes mugs and espresso cups, tea towels, and deck chairs. Penguin admirers maintain a feed on the photo-sharing service Flickr, the Penguin Paperback Spotters Guild, which currently runs more than 7,700 pictures. But collectors are just extreme articulations of the relationship that most brands try to establish with consumers. So why, in this era of a branded planet, is Penguin perhaps the only publishing company in the world with that sort of relationship?
In celebration of Penguin's 75th anniversary this month, the company has initiated a number of projects to celebrate its heritage, including a website, SpeakingToThePast.com, where book lovers can create their own mock Penguin covers. Author Douglas Coupland, who created the project, contributes a short essay on the company's special significance. "Penguin covers! With their cutting edge worthiness! And their dutiful minimalism! What would our lives be like without them?" he writes. "And how many of us can time-stamp periods in our life just by the merest glance at a Penguin cover and its genius format? College. Loneliness. Relationships. Adulthood. In some sense Penguin covers function more as diaries than they do as covers."
Founded in 1935, Penguin was conceived from the start to be a different sort of publisher, a consumer product company with a well articulated set of core values: the founder Allen Lane envisioned reprinting popular and high-quality hardcover books in paperback, selling them in unlikely locations (train stations, Woolworth's men's department) at an affordable price and - most importantly - establishing a regular aesthetic that had the effect of marketing the company as much as it marketed the individual titles. At the bottom of each spine sat a jaunty penguin.
Penguin fans speak of the intellectual aspirational element that comes from buying the books, a sense that you could improve yourself through reading them, in a way that other paperbacks don't promise.
"Nobody walks into a store and says, 'Gee, where are the latest Harper Collins bestsellers?'" notes Diane Waldock, co-owner of the Canadian book distributor North 49 Books. "But people do that with Penguin. It's that little bird."
(She adds that the brand has a hold over employees too - she herself is a Penguin 'alumnus' - and that, "once you're a Penguin, you're branded. You are a Penguin forever. They held us down and stuck a rod on our rears. There's tremendous loyalty to that little bird. Your boss can die, your best friend, your co-worker can retire, you are loyal to the brand.)
Her husband and partner in North 49, Peter Waldock, who is himself a Penguin alumnus, adds that Penguin stands for "quality, consistency, reliability. That's what the consumer wants."
In other words, Penguin has gained the status of an endorsement brand: a set of characteristics that support the promises of a particular product, like the way the Cadbury logo adds something to the experience of enjoying a Dairy Milk bar.
This is an impressive accomplishment, given that Penguin has traditionally spent very little on advertising the brand to consumers. Instead, it prefers to invest in innovative publishing activities, like bringing successful authors - who, after all, have their own brand - on to beat the drum for worthwhile initiatives. "All of that has been very carefully designed to strengthen the profile and position of the brand, but in a way that doesn't compromise its integrity," said John Makinson, president and CEO of the Penguin Group, in an interview.
Still, brand is top of mind for Mr. Makinson, who last year oversaw the publication of The Book of Penguin, a 95-page history of the company produced largely for employees. "The reason I wanted to distribute that was to reinforce to everybody that, although the eBook is something of enormous importance to us, and growing importance every day, the great majority of what we sell is a physical product, with which consumers have a very emotional relationship," he said.
The logo is a key aspect of the brand's value, he added. "I police the visual identity of the brand rather fiercely, and whenever we change it, in my experience, we make it worse," he said. "We have a saying 'round here: You don't mess with the bird."
"We are very clear, in the same way BMW or Mercedes would be clear: You don't mess with those logotypes. They are very, very valuable."
Over the next few months, Penguin will embark on research in a number of its key territories - India, the United Kingdom, the United States, and likely Canada - to more deeply understand how consumers relate to it. "The brand needs to remain contemporary in a digital world, and in a more globally integrated publishing environment. So I've been giving a lot of thought to how Penguin can remain relevant and become more powerful as a brand identity," says Mr. Makinson.
This year, in honour of its anniversary, the company will publish 75 classics from its backlist. "This is a revenue opportunity that would be difficult for other publishers to capture," said Mr. Makinson.
"I sometimes wonder if the consumer will say, 'So what, you're 75 years-old,' but they don't. The consumer thinks it's great we're having a birthday party, and they buy the books. So I do think there are opportunities to do more thematic publishing as the result of the strength of the brand, around the brand, than if we had a greyer identity," he said.
Last Sunday, Mr. Hardie picked up another 30 Penguins for about £50, including an esoteric-looking one from the 1960s titled Writing Technical Reports. But they're likely destined for his shelf rather than his beside table. "The Penguins are very unlikely to get read by me," he admits. "I don't read much in the way of books at all these days, what with the Internet. Maybe collecting the books is partly a displacement activity to keep me from feeling too bad about that!"
Simon Houpt