The Penguin Editions Collection

The Penguin Editions Collection contains over 12,500 items published by Penguin Books, the pioneering paperback publishing firm founded by Allen Lane in Harmondsworth, England, in 1935.

Among the 5,040 titles published during the first thirty years of Penguin's existence, only 39 titles are lacking, thus making it more complete than a comparable collection housed in the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley. The remainder of the collection includes titles published form the late 1960s through the early 1980s. The main series covered are:

Formats represented include musical scores, art prints, dust jackets, signed copies, foreign issues, proof copies, and ephemera.

Approximately 1,700 titles in the main Penguin Books series published prior to 1965 have been cataloged in the main library catalog. Annotated copies of Penguin catalogues serve as findings aids for the remaining items in the collection.

The collection was purchased in 1989 from A. F. Wallis, Ltd., an antiquarian bookseller in England, through a benefaction of Theodore S. Weber, Jr., and his wife Dorothy. Weber, a retired executive of the McGraw-Hill, Inc. publishing company and 1947 alumnus of the university, made the gift in honor of Mr. Weber's parents, Laura K. and Theodore S. Weber, Sr. The Webers have also established a library fund to support retrospective purchases for the College of Arts and Letters.