Signet

Signet appeared on American newsstands on February 25, 1948, as the fiction arm of the New American Library of World Literature. Victor Weybright and Kurt Enoch founded NAL that year after severing ties with Penguin Books in England, and Signet became its label for popular fiction while its sister imprint Mentor handled nonfiction. The two operated out of New York under the shared slogan "Good Reading for the Millions."

In its early decades, Signet published hard-boiled mystery, romance, adventure, and literary fiction in affordable paperbacks distributed through drugstores, supermarkets, and newsstands. Authors on the list included William Faulkner, Truman Capote, Gore Vidal, George Orwell, James Joyce, Mickey Spillane, Arthur Koestler, and Flannery O'Connor. The imprint also produced the James Bond novels of Ian Fleming. By 1965, NAL's Signet and Mentor books were selling over fifty million volumes a year. Over time, the two lines merged into the Signet Classics imprint, which today offers nearly 400 titles spanning Greek mythology, an entire library of Shakespeare's plays, and twentieth-century literature.

WebToTell lists three Stephen King novels under the Signet name: Salem's Lot, The Shining, and The Stand. The imprint's broader catalog has always leaned toward the popular and the widely read, pairing quality writing with a price point that put books in the hands of millions.

A reader picking up a Signet title is getting a book designed for immediate pleasure. The early covers, painted by artists such as James Avati, treated the small paperback as a canvas worth staring at on a drugstore rack. Whether the book is a Faulkner novel, a Bond thriller, or a Signet Classics edition of a Greek myth, the promise is the same: good reading, simply packaged.