A publisher cannot find anything interesting to read for his train journey home

Whisper it, but there was a time, before the internet and the smart phone and 4G networks, when it was possible to find oneself on a train and not have anything with which to amuse oneself besides the ever-changing scenery beyond the carriage window. For some people, staring out at the landscape and thinking deep thoughts is pleasure enough. However, for Allen Lane, in his early thirties but already a managing director of a publishing company, the want of a book to read caused him no end of irritation. And when one day he happened to be at Exeter St David’s station with nothing to read and the prospect of a long journey back to London ahead of him, this event would change the face of publishing forever.

The incident is related on a page towards the back of a selection of Penguin paperbacks. Under the headline, ‘He just wanted a book to read…’ the tale is told in a single paragraph:

‘Not too much to ask, is it?’ It was in 1935 when Allen Lane, managing director of Bodley Head Publishers, stood on a platform at Exeter railway station looking for something good to read on his journey back to London. His choice was limited to popular magazines and poor-quality paperbacks – the same choice faced every day by the majority of readers, few of whom could afford hardbacks. Lane’s disappointment and subsequent anger at the range of books generally available led him to found a company – and change the world.

Oddly, the date is wrong – Lane actually had his epiphany in 1934. The first Penguin paperbacks were launched in July 1935, which perhaps accounts for the error. He had just spent the weekend with the crime-fiction writer Agatha Christie, his favourite among the Bodley Head authors. On the train back to London he set his mind to devising a way of publishing good-quality titles in paperback for a mass market – the sort of books that could, perhaps, be sold on railway stations to bored travellers.

At the time, paperbacks were seen as trashy and, indeed, tended to live down to that reputation. The books that were published in paperback were overwhelmingly of the pulp-fiction variety, wrapped in lurid or crudely sexist covers. Only by buying a hardback book did the reader have any hope of encountering something of merit, and most people could not afford to indulge in such a luxury all that often. Lane’s revolutionary idea was to make such books available for the knockdown price of 6d – the price of a packet of ten cigarettes. Having just spent the week in her company, no doubt Lane could already foresee paperback versions of Christie’s books on sale up and down the country. He envisaged them being sold not just in shops but from vending machines as well (a dream that became reality when the first ‘Penguincubator’ was installed on the Charing Cross Road).

It is fair to say that his proposal did not go down at all well with his fellow directors at Bodley Head, who shared the commonly held view regarding the general undesirability of paperbacks and did not want to sully their company’s products by offering them in that form. Only very reluctantly did they give Lane permission to try out his new venture, and even then they insisted that none of the work on it be done on company time.

It is possible that there was also some residual resentment towards Lane, since he was a cousin of the founder of Bodley Head, John Lane, and had been groomed from the age of 16 to rise through the ranks of the publishing company. On John Lane’s death in 1925, Allen Lane became a director, and went on to chair the company five years later, a 20-something surrounded by men very much his senior in age and a great deal more conservative in their ways of doing business.

Thankfully, Lane could rely on help from his brothers, Dick and John. The three of them chose a name for their new imprint (Dolphin Books and Porpoise Books having been suggested and rejected), and despatched the young artist Edward Young to London Zoo to draw a penguin. The resultant sketch would become famous as the Penguin Books’ colophon (though it would go through several tweaks over the years).

The covers Young proposed for the new company’s books represented a sea change in paperback design. There would be no tacky illustrations – indeed, no illustrations at all – with the titles printed in clear black lettering across a band of white. To ease identification, each book would be coloured according to genre. Novels would be orange; dark blue was chosen for biographies; while crime-fiction titles would be green. As time went by, further genres were added and allotted their own colour: travel and adventure (cerise), drama (red), world affairs (grey), essays (purple), and miscellaneous (yellow). Only in later decades did Penguin paperbacks begin to be adorned (or defaced, according to your taste) with illustrations, but these were still a far cry from the tawdry drawings of the pulp-fiction merchants.

The imprint was launched on 30 July 1935, with an initial roster of ten paperbacks, including A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway and, of course, something by Agatha Christie: her first book, The Mysterious Affair at Styles. This had been published in hardback in the UK in 1921 and had actually made it into paperback form previously (in 1935) but at the higher price of 9d.

Each book in the series was allotted a number. This proved to be an astute move because it encouraged readers to start collecting them so that they might have the pleasure of owning the first ten or the first hundred and so on, even if some of the books might not particularly interest them. Ariel, a biography of Percy Bysshe Shelley by André Maurois, pipped Hemingway’s novel of love and war to the honour of being number one.

Allen Lane declared later, ‘We believed in the existence in this country of a vast reading public for intelligent books at a low price, and staked everything on it.’ His bet came off in spades. Legend has it though that he did have one dicey moment before the launch had even occurred. It is said that the brilliantly titled fancy goods buyer at Woolworth’s, an American named Clifford Prescott, was not enthusiastic about stocking the new imprint. When Lane gave his 15-minute pitch at Woolworth’s executive office in Mayfair, Prescott was less than keen, telling the publisher that his books were not ‘fancy’ enough to be stocked. Customers, he claimed, liked their books to have hard covers adorned with colourful illustrations. It was vitally important for the Lane brothers to get into places like Woolworth’s if they wanted to sell their books in high volumes, and this must have been a terrible blow to Allen. Thankfully, just as the audience with Prescott was ending, the American’s wife happened to pop her head around the door. She had been on a rare shopping expedition in town and her husband had promised to take her out for lunch. Seeing the books on the table between the two men, she raved about how successful they were likely to be, saying that she herself would be likely to buy several every week. Prescott relented and ordered 36,000 copies. That figure soon rose to 63,000 as many of Lane’s first ten titles sold out very swiftly. The Penguin imprint broke away from Bodley Head and on 1 January 1936 became a separate publishing company.

Soon Penguin was expanding into other areas of literature. Pelican Books was launched in 1937 to publish educational titles; Puffin Books began catering for children from 1940; the short-lived Ptarmigan was set up to appeal to the young adult market in 1945; and Penguin Classics started to reprint great works of literature from 1946.

The company’s moment of greatest notoriety and, to many eyes, its finest hour, came in 1960, when Lane published an unexpurgated version of D.H. Lawrence’s novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover with the specific intention of challenging the Obscene Publications Act, which had come into force the year before. A trial ensued, which Lane won. The case was seen as a landmark victory for freedom of expression. It also gave to posterity the infamous observation made by lead prosecutor for the Crown, Mervyn Griffith-Jones, that Lawrence’s novel was not a book that any upright citizen would wish his maidservant to read. Rarely can those in the upper reaches of the legal system have seemed more out of touch with ordinary citizens.

After Penguin, the culture of bookselling and book-reading in Britain changed completely. No longer was ownership of quality books the preserve of those well enough off to afford them. In the opening decades of the 20th century, it is true that those who could not afford to buy a book did have the opportunity to borrow them from a library, but not always for free. This was because many libraries were privately owned affairs run by such as Boots the Chemist (somewhat incongruously) and shops including W. H. Smith and Harrods, and there was a charge per book. The Public Libraries Act of 1850 had introduced the concept of the free council-run library, but Conservative MPs had opposed the bill so virulently in Parliament – fearing the consequences of an educated public – that the bill’s guiding hand, Liberal politician William Ewart, was forced to make a raft of compromises that had severely limited the number of public libraries that were opened.

As Lane said himself in an interview with The Bookseller in May 1935, his imprint could be counted a triumph ‘if these Penguins are the means of converting book-borrowers into book-buyers’. That they certainly did, as they proceeded to sell in their millions, spawning copycat imprints by other publishers.

Allen Lane was knighted for his services to publishing in 1952 and died of bowel cancer in 1970. Although he evidently revolutionised the way books were bought and sold in Britain, it’s a sad fact that, were he to return to Exeter St David’s station today, he would find the situation there much as he had encountered it back in 1934. As Caroline Lodge notes in her Book Word blog, ‘At Exeter St David’s station the only books sold today have to be tracked down in the dingy cave that is WH Smith’s…The shop stocks bestsellers, fiction and nonfiction. Nothing I was tempted to buy and I doubt whether Allen Lane would have thought much of the selection either.’ You can lead a railway station to literature, it would appear, but you may not be able to make it drink at the fount of knowledge for all that long.