Frank Kogan

bah, i have been snowed up with actual real work, and only really have a moment now -- so, very quickly

the puffin club was a very canny project developed by kaye webb, the chief editor of penguin paperbacks childrens' imprint, puffin, in the 60s and 70s: it bascially consisted of a quarterly magazine, full of competitions and reviews, and little articles about books and writers -- importantly, the reviews were of puffin books by their actual readers...

puffin during these decades covered the age-range 4-14 roughly (there was a teen imprint called peacock): and very asteuely gathered together handsome paperback editions of children's classics as well as new children's books -- the pay-off was that it inculcated immense pride and brand loyalty via childhood involvement in a project that was remarkably high quality (webb was a once--in-three-generations kind of a publisher i think)

for a long time puffin cornered the market in children's paperbacks: webb persuaded several rival hardback firms (allen lane being the hardback parent of penguin) that they would do better to licence the children's books they had in hardback to puffin, than start their own children's paperback imprint... by the late 70s i think this lock on the market was probably somewhat breaking down

so anyway: for me, "young adult" meant what puffin books told me it was -- their list was rich and long (see post to come for examples) and i was really quite sniffy about books from other paperback publishers (whose covers were garish and rubbishy; and whose books just never seemed as good)... the downside being that i found it incredibly difficult graduating onto slightly-less-young-adult fiction, and in a sense never quite did (i plunged into my dad's SF paperbacks; after that i was mainly reading music-writing)