Penguin Random House

Two publishing legends, one house. Allen Lane was visiting Agatha Christie in 1934 when he stopped at the station bookstall at Exeter and found nothing worth reading -- overpriced, poorly made, entirely uninspiring. He went home and launched Penguin Books the following year with a radical conviction: that good literature should be affordable, beautiful, and available everywhere. The first ten Penguin paperbacks sold for sixpence each -- the price of a pack of cigarettes. Within a year Penguin had sold over a million books and changed what publishing could be. Across the Atlantic, Bennett Cerf and Donald Klopfer were 27 and 23 years old in 1925 when they bought The Modern Library on a whim. Two years later they decided to expand. "We're just going to publish a few books on the side at random," they said -- and named the company accordingly. Random House went on to publish James Joyce's Ulysses in America, launch the careers of William Faulkner and Truman Capote, and build one of the most storied lists in publishing history. In 2013 the two houses merged into Penguin Random House, the world's largest book publisher, representing more than 300 imprints and publishing houses across 20 countries. On a registry, a Penguin Random House title is a gift with nearly a century of literary legacy behind it -- the book that becomes the first one you read together, or the one that lives on your nightstand for years.