Sue Carter
THERE’S AN oft-repeated story about Terry Waite, the British humanitarian who was held in captivity by an Islamic Jihadist group in Beirut for nearly five years during the late 1980s. According to his 1997 memoir, Footfalls in Memory, Waite, desperate for books to read, drew a picture of a penguin and gave it to a guard. The guard returned with a Penguin Books paperback of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov.
As that anecdote illustrates, Penguin arguably is the most visually recognizable international publishing house in the world. Although the brand has modernized over its 80 years of existence, discarding its iconic cover colour schemes for more contemporary designs, that little bird has travelled far and long, as witnessed by the line of merchandise available at the publisher’s new mini retail space in downtown Toronto. Nostalgia runs deep at the Penguin Shop, located on the lobby floor of the office tower that is home to the Penguin Random House Canada headquarters: beyond the sampling of classic titles and new releases, there is a wall lined with branded water bottles and mugs, travel tags and tote bags (for a tour of the space, see page 10).