Puffin Books

History

Puffin began with picture books. In 1939 Noel Carrington, an editor at Country Life books, proposed to Penguin's founder, Allen Lane, a series of cheap, brightly colored non-fiction books for children, inspired by lithographed books mass-produced for Soviet children. Lane liked the idea; the first Puffin Picture Books appeared in 1940, the name chosen to sit alongside Penguin and Pelican. A fiction list followed in 1941 with Worzel Gummidge, and the first editor, Eleanor Graham, steered it through wartime paper rationing. In the 1950s Puffin made its mark in fantasy, adding C. S. Lewis's The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (The Chronicles of Narnia) and E. B. White's Charlotte's Web to its list.

The golden age came under Kaye Webb, editor from 1961 to 1979. In a decade the list grew from 51 titles to more than 1,200 in print. Webb secured paperback rights to Philippa Pearce, Rosemary Sutcliff, Alan Garner and classics including The Hobbit, and in 1967 founded the Puffin Club, with its magazine Puffin Post, holidays and exhibitions; at its peak it had 200,000 members. She answered children's letters and priced membership so that any child could join.

In the early 1980s Puffin took the gamble that brings it into this museum. Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone, founders of Games Workshop, had spent years importing roleplaying games into Britain. At a Games Day convention in 1980 they met an editor from Penguin, and talk turned to a book that could introduce roleplaying to young readers. Their answer was a book in which the reader was the hero: numbered paragraphs, a choice at the end of each, and a simple system of dice and three scores, Skill, Stamina and Luck, with the book itself standing in for the Game Master. Puffin editor Philippa Dickinson, who had worked for Webb on the Puffin Club, edited the first title. The Warlock of Firetop Mountain was published in August 1982, and Penguin, cautious, printed just 5,000 copies. It sold more than two million, and by March 1983 Fighting Fantasy books held the top three places on the Sunday Times bestseller list.

Fighting Fantasy became a phenomenon. Puffin published 59 titles in the original series, ending with Curse of the Mummy in 1995, and the line sold some 20 million copies. Puffin also issued the first five issues of Warlock, a Fighting Fantasy magazine, before Games Workshop took it over. The 1980s also brought film tie-ins and the teenage Puffin Plus line; later decades added Artemis Fowl, the British editions of Percy Jackson, and Roald Dahl, whose 2023 sensitivity edits caused a public row and led Puffin to keep the original texts in print as well.

Notable work

For fantasy readers, Puffin means Narnia and The Hobbit in paperback, Alan Garner, and above all Fighting Fantasy, from The Warlock of Firetop Mountain and The Citadel of Chaos to Deathtrap Dungeon and the Sorcery! series.

Legacy

Puffin's fantasy influence is quiet but enormous. It made the classics of Children's & YA Fantasy cheap and ubiquitous in Britain, and with Fighting Fantasy it created the British Gamebooks & Interactive Books boom, a cousin of Bantam's Choose Your Own Adventure. For many children in the 1980s, a Puffin gamebook bought at a newsagent was their first Dungeon crawl and their first character sheet. The series' dice-and-paragraph logic reads, in hindsight, like a paper prototype of the computer adventure, and Livingstone himself went on to a long career in the video game industry.