Penguin Books is a publisher founded in 1935 by Sir Allen Lane. Penguin revolutionised publishing in the 1930s through its high quality, inexpensive paperbacks, sold through Woolworths and other high street stores for sixpence. Penguin's success demonstrated that large audiences existed for serious books. Penguin also had a significant impact on public debate in Britain, through its books on politics, the arts, and science. Penguin Books is now the flagship imprint of the worldwide Penguin Group and is owned by Pearson PLC.

The first Penguin paperbacks were published in 1936, but at first only as an imprint of Bodley Head (of Vigo Street) with the books originally distributed from the crypt of Holy Trinity Church Marylebone. Only paperback editions were published until the “King Penguin” series debuted in 1939, and latterly the Pelican History of Art was undertaken: these were unsuitable as paperbacks because of the length and copious illustrations on art paper so cloth bindings were chosen instead. Penguin Books has its registered office in the City of Westminster, London, England.

David Bellos is an English-born translator and biographer. Bellos currently teaches French and Comparative literature at Princeton University in the United States. He is also director of Princeton's Program in Translation and Intercultural Communication.

Bellos' research topics have included Balzac and Georges Perec. Bellos published an award-winning translation of Perec's most famous novel, Life A User's Manual in 1987. He won the first Man Booker International Prize for translation in 2005 for his translations of works by Albanian author Ismail Kadare, despite not speaking Albanian; the translations were done from previous French translations.

Bellos has written a number of award-winning literary biographies and an introduction to translation studies, Is That a Fish in Your Ear? Translation and The Meaning of Everything (2011).

He appears in The Magnificent Tati, a documentary about the filmmaker Jacques Tati.

The Books were an American duo, formed in New York City in 1999, consisting of guitarist and vocalist Nick Zammuto and cellist Paul de Jong. Their releases typically incorporate samples of obscure sounds and speech. They have released three critically acclaimed albums on the German label Tomlab, and released their fourth studio album, The Way Out, on Temporary Residence Limited in July 2010.

Zammuto and de Jong first met in New York City in 1999 as they shared the same apartment building. De Jong invited Zammuto to dinner at his apartment, where he played him some of his collection of audio and video samples, including a Shooby Taylor record. Zammuto said of their meeting that "we both kind of knew at that moment that we listened (to music) in interesting ways and had similar approaches to music." Soon after, they began playing what they considered to be pop music, in comparison to their own works, under the name The Books.

In 2000, The Books started work on what would become their début album Thought for Food. Zammuto and de Jong moved locations constantly during this time, recording in New York, Los Angeles, Boston, and finally in the basement of a hostel in North Carolina where Zammuto worked for a while after hiking the Appalachian Trail.