New American Library (Signet)

New American Library began in 1948. Kurt Enoch and Victor Weybright, who had been running Penguin's American operation, broke away from the British parent and set up an independent house in New York. They called it New American Library of World Literature, and most people shortened that to NAL.

The first list was built on cheap paperbacks that mixed the serious with the sensational. Early titles included D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover, William Faulkner's Sanctuary and work by John Steinbeck. Signet and Mentor were the two main imprints at the start. For its first fifteen years or so NAL concentrated on paperbacks, and it only began issuing occasional hardcovers in 1963. Ownership changed later. Penguin Group bought NAL in 1986, and after Penguin merged with Random House in 2013 the imprint became part of Penguin Random House.

The NAL name has covered a lot of ground over the decades. Signet ran the longest-lived line of Regency romances in the US, which began in the late 1970s. Plume was created in 1970 as NAL's trade paperback imprint. The Roc imprint took over the BattleTech novel line after its first twelve books had been published in-house by FASA. The common thread is the original idea of putting books in front of a wide audience at a modest price.

The Glass Menagerie comes to WebToTell through Signet. Its edition of Tennessee Williams's memory play was a mass-market paperback issued in October 1987, with a movie tie-in cover. The play, which Williams first published in 1945, is the story of Tom, his mother Amanda and his sister Laura and her collection of glass animals. A Signet paperback of this kind is a plain, inexpensive way to read a stage classic. Readers who pick up an NAL or Signet book can expect a mainstream paperback rather than a scholarly edition. Check the title page of any particular copy for its introduction and notes.