Doubleday executive editor and VP Gerald Howard has won the Mercantile Library Center for Fiction’s 2009 Maxwell E. Perkins Award for Distinguished Achievement in the Field of Fiction.

Howard will receive his award at the Library’s November 9 annual dinner in New York City. This is the fifth year the award has been given out, and past recipients included Harcourt editor Drenka Willen and Farrar, Straus & Giroux president Jonathan Galassi. To find out more about the winner, check out this GalleyCat interview with Howard.

Here’s an excerpt from the release: “Mr. Howard has been with Doubleday since 1998. In his tenure at Doubleday, he has worked with Kate Christensen, Pat Barker, Walter Kirn, Chuck Palahniuk, Bill Bryson, Muriel Spark, Robert Bingham and Gore Vidal.”

Penguin is reissuing 36 recent bestsellers in the classic Penguin paperback look to mark its Publisher of the Year win at the British Book Awards, according to the Bookseller‘s Alison Flood. Its initial print run for the series totals 815,000 copies. The “Penguin Celebrations” titles, ranging from Pat Barker‘s REGENERATION to Donna Tartt‘s THE SECRET HISTORY to Meg Rosoff‘s HOW I LIVE NOW, will be published on 6th September in six of the classic Penguin designs given “a modern reworking” by Penguin Press art director Jim Stoddart. They are slightly larger than the original Penguin pocket size in B format, and all books are priced at £7.99.

“We wanted to celebrate being Publisher of the Year, not just through marketing but also through our publishing,” said publishing director Tony Lacey. He said the look had “a hint of retro as well as being chic” and added that the pricing point was a “homage” to the original Penguin principle of a uniform paperback pricepoint of sixpence (though the percent difference between then and now is rather staggering…)