Albatross Books

Albatross Books

Albatross Books was a German publishing house based in Hamburg that produced the first modern mass market paperback books.

Albatross was founded in 1932 by John Holyrod-Reece, Max Wegner and Kurt Enoch. The name was chosen because "Albatross' is the same word in many European languages. Based on the example of Tauchnitz, a Leipzig publishing firm that had been producing inexpensive and paperbound English-language reprints for a continental market, Albatross set about to streamline and modernize the paperback format.

Produced in a new standardized size (181 x 111 mm) that approximated an esthetically pleasing ratio called the Golden Mean, using new sans-serif fonts developed by Stanley Morison among others, color-coding its offerings by genre (green for travel, orange for fiction, etc.), and prominently featuring an albatross as a logo, the series was so successful that Albatross soon purchased Tauchnitz, giving itself an instant 100-year heritage.

The oncoming war brought the Albatross experiment to an end. Allen Lane adopted the look-and-feel of Albatross editions closely, copying most of its innovations, for the first Penguin Books. Lane later hired co-founder Kurt Enoch to manage Penguin's American branch.

External links

* [http://paperbarn.www1.50megs.com/Paperbacks/msg6.htm The Third Paperback Revolution] - By Hyde Park Books of Boise, Idaho.


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