Visiting London a few years ago I stumbled upon the Design Museum and an exhibition on the book publisher, Penguin Books. I have always been attracted to Penguin paperbacks, initially due to their simple yet attractive cover design and the delightful penguin logo, but also because of their line of classic literature available at a reasonable price.
Penguin paperbacks were the brainchild of publisher Allen Lane, who, returning to London from a weekend at the Devon home of the crime writer Agatha Christie in 1934, scoured Exeter Station for something to read. All he could find were reprints of 19th century novels and Lane decided to found a publishing house to produce good quality paperbacks sold at sixpence each, the same price as a packet of cigarettes. Lane’s secretary suggested Penguin as a “dignified, but flippant” name for the company and the office junior Edward Young was sent to sketch the penguins at London Zoo as its logotype. Young went on to design the distinctive covers utilizing a simple horizontal grid for Penguin’s paperbacks in colours that signified the genre of each book: orange for fiction, green for crime, and blue for biography. The first set of ten paperbacks was published in the summer of 1935.
Understanding Penguin’s mission of democratizing great literature it seems natural that the publisher should launch A Million Penguins —a web-based, collaborative novel that can be written, edited or read by anyone, anywhere thanks to “wiki” software, the technology behind web encyclopedia Wikipedia. Penguin claims that the project is not a marketing ploy but a social experiment. It gets even better—A Million Penguins is a collaborative project between the publisher and group of creative writing and new media students. Students at Leicester’s De Montfort University (DMU) have teamed up with Penguin in this “global experiment in new media writing.” The DMU community has even created a blog about their experience: A Million Penguins and DMU.
There are a number of exciting implications to this project. It’s thrilling to see a major publisher embracing new technology and partnering with the academic community in a worldwide project of this scope. But what are most significant are the technology itself and the impact it is making on society, human culture and the arts. Web-based media, blogging and experiments such as Wikipedia are transforming the manner in which we interact, communicate, and exchange information. While I’m not fully sold on the efficacy of the new technology there is no doubt that young people are turning away from traditional print sources and embracing web-based media to meet their needs for news and entertainment. As for how this experiment will impact on literature and the arts, I’ll be monitoring the project site to find out. A Million Penguins is not the first experiment in collaborative web-based creative projects but it may be the most ambitious. I’ll discuss other such projects in future posts.
~TAB
