Penguin

Welcome to Penguin.

You know our name, I hope, and I also hope you know our books, particularly those books that carry the image of the penguin in the orange oval on the spine. But you may not know, with quite such familiarity, all the other members of the Penguin family around the world.

So we are a very disparate organisation at Penguin. We are disparate in terms of what we write and what we publish, and we are also disparate in thinking about where we operate.

What binds us together is a common set of objectives and of values. We all believe, for example, in the importance of design as a central feature of all of our publishing.

Since Allen Lane started this business in 1935 design has been central to what we do and it remains so today. So too, is our determination to look not just to Allen Lane and to the past but also to the future of publishing.

We have every confidence in the book as a product. People are going to want to buy, handle, read and treasure books for as long as we publishers are in business. But at the same time, digital technology is opening up new opportunities for us to distribute our products in different ways, to create them, to secure them and to sell them.

A second quality that unites us is a global approach to what we do. In India, for example, we have been present for 20 years as an English language publishing company, and enjoy probably the higher share of that market that any publisher enjoys of any market in the world.

But what binds us more than our focus on globalisation or digital technology or even design, is a common set of values and beliefs as a publishing company. We are, after all, the publisher that defended the right to publish 'Lady Chatterley's Lover'.

And we have consistently stood up for the rights to freedom of expression for our authors. 70 years ago, Penguin was a fledgling publishing company, operating from a crypt, a church in central London. Today, we operate everywhere in the world and we are the most famous name in all of publishing. We have achieved that success quite simply by publishing great books and publishing them really well.

JOHN MAKINSON