Penguin Books is one of the largest English-language publishing houses in the world, founded in London in 1935 by Allen Lane as a paperback imprint of The Bodley Head and spun off as an independent company in 1936. The original Penguin paperback line gave the working English-language reader inexpensive, well-designed, high-quality reprints of literary fiction and serious nonfiction at sixpence a volume, the same price as a packet of cigarettes, and is widely credited with creating the modern paperback book trade.
Since the 2013 merger with Random House to form Penguin Random House, Penguin is one of the Big Five global trade publishers. Its writing-craft and reference list, particularly through the Penguin Reference, Penguin Books USA, and Plume imprints and Gotham Books, has published many of the major working titles on writing, language, and literature, including titles by Mary Buckham, Steven Pressfield, Sarah Domet, and the Writer's Digest series in distribution.
