Puffin Books
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| Parent company | Penguin Young Readers Group (Penguin Group) |
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| Founded | 1940 |
| Country of origin | United Kingdom |
| Headquarters location | London |
| Key people | Francesca Dow (managing director) |
| Publication types | Books |
| No. of employees | 50 |
| Official website | www.puffin.co.uk |
Puffin Books is the children's imprint of British publishers Penguin Books. Since the 1960s it has been among the largest publishers of children's books in the UK and much of the English-speaking world.
Four years after Penguin Books had been founded by Allen Lane, the idea for Puffin Books was hatched in 1939 when Noel Carrington, at the time an editor for Country Life books, met him and proposed a series of children's non-fiction picture books, inspired by the brightly coloured lithographed books mass-produced at the time for Soviet children. Lane saw the potential, and the first of the picture book series were published the following year. The name "Puffin" was a natural companion to the existing "Penguin" and "Pelican" books. Many continued to be reprinted right into the 1970s. A fiction list soon followed, when Puffin secured the paperback rights to Barbara Euphan Todd's 1936 story Worzel Gummidge and brought it out as the first Puffin story book in 1941.
The first Puffin editor, Eleanor Graham, saw the imprint through the 1940s and the struggles with paper rationing, and in the 1950s Puffin made its mark in fantasy with tales such as The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C. S. Lewis and Charlotte's Web by E. B. White. Some other notable titles whose paperback rights were acquired by Puffin included The Family from One End Street by Eve Garnett, the first children’s fiction title to depict a working-class home, which Puffin published in 1942, the Professor Branestawm books by Norman Hunter (1946), Ballet Shoes by Noel Streatfeild (1949), Carbonel: The King of the Cats by Barbara Sleigh (1955), and The Silver Sword by Ian Serraillier (1960). Many different genres featured in the list, e.g. The Puffin Song Book (PS 100), 1956.
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