1935 The UK’s first mass-market paperbacks were launched as Penguin Books (under the Bodley Head imprint) on this date. The first batch of ten were:
Ariel: a Shelley Romance – André Maurois
A Farewell to Arms – Ernest Hemingway
Poet’s Pub – Eric Linklater
Madame Claire – Susan Ertz
The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club – Dorothy L. Sayers
The Mysterious Affair at Styles – Agatha Christie
Twenty-Five – Beverley Nichols
Gone to Earth – Mary Webb
Carnival – Compton Mackenzie
After a quickly aborted experiment with Woolworth’s 3d and 6d department stores, Lane’s stylish reprints (drawing on the talents of typographers and designers such as Eric Gill and Stanley Morison) established themselves in conventional bookshop outlets. Penguins were, from the first, paperbacks that sold like hardbacks, and in many cases were an even more respectable imprint. For an author to be ‘Penguined’ was a mark of high merit.
Allen Lane learned his publishing with his uncle John Lane (whose surname he adopted), whose house put out the work of many of the most distinguished writers of the late Victorian and Edwardian period – most famously, perhaps, Oscar Wilde (who returned the compliment by naming the suave butler in The Importance of Being Earnest ‘Lane’). Allen Lane, in his early thirties at the time, claimed to have had the inspiration for his paperback pocket books while standing on the platform of Exeter station, having just visited Agatha Christie and having nothing to read.
Lane eschewed pictorial covers throughout his long career as Britain’s leading paperback publisher. He thought them vulgar. In America the mass-market paperback pioneer was Robert de Graff, who launched his ‘Pocket Books’ in 1939. His strategy was less to embed his product in the traditional bookstore than to circumvent that outlet entirely. De Graff’s 25¢ Pocket Books were essentially ‘drugstore’ paperbacks. They had eye-catching illustrated covers, newsprint-quality paper, and, typically, slapdash typography. They were designed to retail less like books (items of civilised furniture) than short-life magazines. And not, necessarily, the more respectable kind of magazine.