Penguin Books Limited is an English publishing house. It was co-founded in 1935 by Allen Lane with his brothers Richard and John, as a line of the publishers the Bodley Head, only becoming a separate company the following year. Penguin revolutionised publishing in the 1930s through its inexpensive paperbacks, sold through Woolworths and other stores for sixpence, bringing high-quality fiction and non-fiction to the mass market. Its success showed that large audiences existed for several books. It also significantly affected modern British popular culture through its books concerning politics, the arts, and science.
Penguin Books is now an imprint of the worldwide Penguin Random House, a conglomerate formed in 2013 by its merger with American publisher Random House, a subsidiary of German media conglomerate Bertelsmann. Penguin Group was previously wholly owned by Pearson plc, the British global media company which also owned the Financial Times. When Penguin Random House was formed, Pearson had a 47% stake in the new company, which was reduced to 25% in July 2017. Since April 2020, Penguin Random House has been a wholly-owned subsidiary of Bertelsmann. It is part of the Big Five, a group of the largest English-language publishers, along with Holtzbrinck/Macmillan, Hachette, HarperCollins and Simon & Schuster.