Pick up a Penguin

What must it have been like for Allen Lane to wander into a bookshop in the 1940s and see the serried ranks of pale-blue, cerise, green, yellow, dark-blue and grey Penguins on display, knowing that he was responsible for all of them? His genius idea had in less than a decade transformed not just bookselling but also what everyone in Britain (and soon the English-speaking world) was reading. Penguins were cheap to buy, just 6d a throw, or the price of a packet of cigarettes, yet were literature of the highest quality and broadest range — from Maurois, Hemingway, Marx and Homer to Dorothy L. Sayers, Agatha Christie and Compton Mackenzie. Until 1935, such books had been available only in expensive hardbacks or on temporary loan from the library. Now even the poorly paid could just about afford to put up orange-box shelves and fill them with Penguins.

The story of Allen Lane’s Eureka moment is so well known that it’s become suspiciously clichéed. But the children’s author Michael Morpurgo retold it in delightfully fairytale fashion for Penguin, Puffin and the Paperback Revolution on Thursday morning (Radio 4), so it must be true. Lane was waiting for a train to take him back to London from Devon where he had been spending the weekend with his friend Agatha Christie (who else?). He needed something to read but could find nothing in the bookshop on Platform 1 at Exeter station but trashy paperbacks printed on nasty paper with garish covers illustrating dastardly crimes or lush romantic thrills. In a flash, he recognised a gap in the book market, and knew how to fill it, having joined his uncle’s publishing firm as a 16-year-old with no qualifications but a hard-headed business sense and a canny gift for sniffing out what will sell.