Rob Blackhurst

In 1935, Allen Lane, Managing Editor of Bodley Head publishers, was having a bad time in the office. His company on the brink of bankruptcy due to some ruinous publishing decisions – and he was looking for a scheme that would restore its fortunes.

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Legend has it that at Exeter railway station, on the way home from visiting Agatha Christie's country pile, he was idly searching for something to read from the station bookstall. He could only find magazines, cheap romances and old reprints of Victorian novels. What would happen, thought this ex grammar school boy, if he created a good quality range of paperbacks that could fit into a jacket pocket or handbag and were made available for the price of a packet of cigarettes?

Bodley Head rejected his idea so, after persuading his parents to remortgage their home to fund the venture, he set up on his own. Though the idea of mass-market paperbacks was stunningly original in the fusty English publishing world, it was a concept borrowed wholesale from the Albatross Press in Germany. Lane searched for a similar name that would seem "dignified but flippant" until his secretary suggested Penguin. Designer David Young was immediately dispatched to London zoo where he "spent the rest of the day drawing penguins in every pose".

The first ten Penguin paperbacks included works by Agatha Christie, Dorothy L Sayer – all with the simple, modern three-strip design by Eric Gill. They borrowed the Albatross Press's colourful classification system orange for fiction, dark blue for biography, green for crime. The first Penguins were sold in 1935 in vending machines at Charing Cross Station (dubbed the "Penguincubator", tobacconists, and, most galling for the rest of the publishing world - in Woolworths.

They were an immediate success, selling a million in the first four months and allowing a whole new readership to read books that had previously been dependent on their library card. By 1960, 250 million books had been sold. The range eventually covered a vast range of subjects – from classics by Trollope to manuals on successful goat husbandry.

Allen Lane himself was amazed by their success. 'Who would have imagined that, even at 6d, there was a thirsty public anxious to buy thousands of copies of books on science, sociology, economics, archaeology, astronomy and other, equally serious subjects?' Readers were thirsty for knowledge about the gathering international clouds and the latest developments in science. And for a country ambling out of the depression, a book sold for the fifth of the price of a hardback was difficult to resist.

The conservative publishing industry was sceptical. By "cheapening" their product, publishers worried that they would lose their well-heeled audience, and many bookshops initially refused to stock them. George Orwell wrote: 'in my capacity as a reader, I applaud the Penguin Books; in my capacity as a writer, I pronounce them anathema. The result may be a flood of cheap reprints which will check the output of new novels".' But they soon had to bow to the spirit of the age. Allen Lane did not invent the paperback but he showed that the popular taste should not be underestimated: in the work canteens, in the pubs, on the buses – there were ordinary people who wanted more than potboilers and cheap romances.