According to the founder of Penguin Books, Allen Lane, he
was inspired to start publishing cheap paperbacks when he had time to kill on
Exeter station (he was returning to London after paying a visit to Agatha
Christie) and was hard-pressed to find anything suitable in the station
bookstall. All that was on offer were reprinted classics and pulp novels.
There was clearly a gap in the market for contemporary
writing aimed at a mass audience. What was needed were books that were easy to
read, convenient to take around with one, readily available and very reasonably
priced. The Penguin imprint, which began in July 1935, would concentrate on
popular fiction, particularly crime, and biography.
Allen Lane’s genius was to make his Penguin books easily recognizable,
which he did by sticking to a consistent cover design that was colour-coded to
show the type of content – dark blue for biography, orange for general fiction,
green for crime fiction, etc.
The first ten titles, all published at the same time, were
reprints of books that Allen Lane thought would sell well, and he was correct
with some of his guesses, but not all. They included crime novels by Agatha Christie
and Dorothy L Sayers, fiction by Ernest Hemingway, Compton Mackenzie and Eric
Linklater, and a biography of Shelley.
However, some of his first batch of authors are little known
today. That is a risk that publishers always take – but by printing in volume
and getting good marketing deals from outlets such as Woolworths, the gains
easily outweighed the losses and Penguin Books sold a million volumes in its
first ten months, each one priced at sixpence.
Penguin Books soon expanded into other fields, such as the
Pelican imprint for non-fiction titles and the Puffin children’s book imprint.
The success of Penguin Books showed that it was possible to
get people reading good books if the product was attractive and properly marketed.
Literary writing was now a mass-market commodity.
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