Viking Press (formally Viking Penguin, also listed as Viking Books) is an American publishing company owned by Penguin Random House. It was founded in New York City on March 1, 1925, by Harold K. Guinzburg and George S. Oppenheimer
The publisher's name and logo, a Viking ship drawn by Rockwell Kent, were chosen as symbols of enterprise, adventure, and exploration in publishing.
Viking Press was sold to Penguin Books in 1975 for $12 million due to the publishing house's monetary difficulties. These were speculated to have been caused by the shrinkage in the juvenile market and Viking Press' lack of a textbook division.
Imprints
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Viking Kestrel
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Viking Adult, who got in legal trouble in 1946 due to John Steinbeck's bold eulogy, and fell out of public favor in 1947
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Viking Children's Books
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Viking Portable Library
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Pamela Dorman Books
Viking Children's
In 1933, Viking Press founded a department called Junior Books to publish children's books. The first book published was
The Story About Ping in 1933 under editor
May Massee. Junior Books was later renamed Viking Children's Books. Viking Kestrel was one of its imprints.
Its books have won the Newbery Medal and Caldecott Medal Medals, and include such books as The Twenty-One Balloons, written and illustrated by William Pene du Bois (1947, Newbery medal winner for 1948), Corduroy, Make Way for Ducklings, The Stinky Cheese Man by Jon Scieszka and Lane Smith (1993), The Outsiders, Pippi Longstocking, and The Story of Ferdinand. Its paperbacks are now published by Puffin Books, which includes the Speak and Firebird Books imprints. In 2023, Tamar Brazis was named v-p and publisher of Viking Children's Books.
Viking Critical Library
The
Viking Critical Library offers academic editions of
Classic book. Like W. W. Norton's
Norton Critical Editions, all titles print the text alongside a selection of critical essays and contextual documents (including relevant extracts from the author's oeuvre). The series, which only saw sporadic publications in the late 1970s and late 1990s, has been dormant since 1998, with no new titles released since then. However, a number of existing titles remain in print.
- Titles
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| Mark Osteen | . |
| John Clark Pratt | |
| Robert Scholes | |
| Chester G. Anderson | The only title known to include explanatory end notes. |
| John Clark Pratt | Out of print. |
| Scott Donaldson | Out of print. |
| Gerald Weales | |
| Gerald Weales | |
| Kevin Hearle | |
Notable authors
Notable editors
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Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, consulting editor
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Wendy Wolf, vice president and associate editor, as of 1994
Awards
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10 Newbery Medals
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10 Caldecott Medals
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27 Newbery Honors
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33 Caldecott Honors
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1 American Book Award
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2 Coretta Scott King Awards
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3 Batcheldor Honors
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5 Christopher Medals
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2 Margaret A. Edwards Awards for authors S. E. Hinton and Richard Peck
Further reading
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Bean, Martha Sue. A History and Profile of the Viking Press, Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Theses, 1969.
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"Viking Press, Viking Penguin", Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 46, pp. 365-368.
External links
