from francis spufford's the child that books built:

for me, walking up the road aged seven or eight to spend my pocket money on a paperback, the outward sign of this unity was the dominance of puffin books. in britain, almost everyhting written for children passed into the one paperback imprint. on the shelves of the children section in a bookshop, practically all the stock would be identically neat soft-covered octavos, in different colours, with different cover art, but always with the same sans serid type on the spine, and the same little logo of an upstanding puffin...if you were a reading child in the uk in the sixties or the seventies, you too probably remember how securely authoritative puffins seemed, with the long, trustworthy descriptions of the story inside the front cover, always written by the same arbiter, the puffin editor kaye webb, and their astonishingly precise recommendation to "girls of eleven and above, and sensitive boys." it was as if puffin were part of the administration of the world. they were the department of the welfare state responsible for the distribution of narrative. and their reach seemed universal: not just the really good books you were going to remember forever, but the nearly good ones too and the completely forgettable ones that at the time formed the wings of reading and spread them wide enough to enfold you in books on all sides.