Settle down, everyone: Round One…

The gloves were off last night, as Particular Books launched with a head-scratching, brain-teasing, knowledge-dredging Quiz to End All Quizzes at the Ivy House in Holborn. The six-man teams included booksellers and Penguins alike, and ranged from Occasionally Right (Rights), Economic Collapse (Finance) and http://www.winners.com (Online), to the heart-breakingly named Hopefully Better Than Waterstone's.

The first round – English Countryside – had us baffled with questions about swan-upping, but reassured us when our teams got the correct answers for questions about a man being buried with his heart in a biscuit tin (Thomas Hardy) and the misconception of Gypsy provenance (Egypt). The Pubs round brought the teams close to fisticuffs, with quotes from Coleridge, Churchill and Ogden Nash, and all the teams frantically trying to remember the words to Pop Goes the Weasel (fact lovers: it references The Eagle on City Road). Round 3, a fashion round, introduced quizmaster extraordinaire Simon Winder to the world of Jefferson Hack, Kanye West and Milla Jovovich, and made us all resolve to wear a little more colour, a little wilder heels, and accessorise a little neater. Just as long as we can name which film Lauren Hutton starred in alongside Richard Gere in the 80s (American Gigolo. Yesssssssss.) The Weird English Words in round 4 introduced us to B.U.R.M.A., a baby oyster (a spat), the oche and the hiphop female equivalent of 'pimpjuice' ('Milkshake', apparently. Discuss). Aaaand… relax.

Ten minutes to scoff some delicious Thai food, and then onwards into battle. The fifth round, titled 'Q & U', baffled some team-members. After answering 'lacquer', 'Quebec' and 'equals sign' for previous answers, one of our group decided the answer to 'A traditional lawn game involving the throwing of a metal or rubber ring to land over a pin?' was hoopla. Weak. Link.

The Animal Names and Facts of the sixth round gave me enough fascinating facts to bar me from a pub for a month. (Did you know that the deadliest marine animal is the box jellyfish? And that George Washington's teeth were made from hippo tusks? Or that itching powder is made from tarantula hair? Or that the only domestic animal not mentioned in the Bible is the cat?) The final round saw us reaching deep into our GCSE memories to recall how French we were, with questions ranging from the most hated man in French schools (Charlemagne – he invented school) to the Four Musketeers (no, none of them was called Dogtagnan). Having been in the top three for much of the night, we were cruelly pushed into fourth place, and victory was snatched from the Colophon of Publishers by the seven-strong team, Bardini the Magnificent.

If I've learnt anything from the night it's that a gricer is a trainspotter, Shakespeare's father was an ale-inspector, and I shouldn't do pub quizzes with anyone I have to face the next day.

Sam the Copywriter

What’s in a name?

It's a truth universally acknowledged in publishing that imprints mean little to most readers. Indeed, you might be thinking as you read this, 'what's an imprint?'. Well, an imprint is the (rough) equivalent of a record label. As certain labels are known for putting out a certain kind of music, so imprints are known for publishing a certain kind of book. Penguin itself is an imprint: a paperback imprint, under which all our paperbacks – from Marian Keyes to JK Galbraith – are published (except for Penguin Classics and Modern Classics, which are imprints themselves). But we have various hardback imprints too, and these hardback imprints are known – to agents, authors, bookshops, journalists, literary editors and other publishers, if not the General Public – for different things.

In Penguin Press our hardback imprint is Allen Lane. Allen Lane is known for publishing a certain kind of high minded non-fiction, books on subjects or by authors that have to be known about, from Nassim Taleb on Black Swans to Richard Overy on the second world war. And yet we've always published books that, while close to our hearts, aren't truly on subjects that you have to know about but more on subjects that are fun to know about. These are books like Albert Jack's Pop Goes the Weasel, or Britain & Ireland's Best Wild Places by Christopher Somerville.

Last January Penguin Press had an away day and we started to think that perhaps these books deserved their own home. We thought about the qualities these books shared, and about a name and colophon (or logo) that would represent them. We talked with booksellers about other books and other publishers and imprints who publish well in this area. We asked them what they liked. And in the end we focused on the idea that these books are fun to know: the subject matter is fun to know, the voice of the author is passionate and characterful, the physical book is charming. Georgina Laycock, Editorial Director, came up with the name: Particular Books. Stefanie Posavec conceived of the origami rabbit. The name and the rabbit gave us a visual reference point
and helped us focus.

Download Particular Books

We began to talk with agents about the kind of book we hoped to publish in Particular Books, and launched the imprint at our sales conference in February, with (among other things) a presenter on the books that can be turned into a fortune teller. This year we will publish seven titles with a rabbit on their spine. The first two books are published in July: Why Is Q Always Followed by U? and The Country Alphabet by Geoffrey Grigson. Books that follow, this year and next, include books about collective nouns for animals, the history of pub names, odd words from the English language, gardening, how to build a made-to-measure bike, and more.

So why do we think imprints matter? The reasons are, I suppose, all associated with purpose. Lots of decisions get made in the process of publishing a book. An author decides to write a book or proposal, an agent decides which imprint and editor to send that to, the publishing team decides whether it wants to publish the book, the author and agent decide who to sell the book to… Once the book is bought we all make decisions about format, price, the jacket, the title and subtitle, the kind of publicity we aim for, where the book will sit in bookstores, and so on.

Of course, many things happen to a book over which we have no control, and making decisions doesn't mean we shouldn't be open to changing our minds or thinking anew. But we hope having this new imprint will help us think clearly about the decisions we make, and open our and agents' eyes to publishing opportunities we might not have seen before. An imprint helps everyone imagine what a book might be and fosters, we hope, a sense of common purpose.

Helen Conford, heading up Particular Books with Georgina Laycock

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