Almanac: Penguin Books
And now a page from our "Sunday Morning" Almanac: September 21st, 1902, 112 years ago today . . . the birthday of the creator of the Penguin, the line of quality paperback books.
According to one account, Allen Lane was returning by train from a visit to mystery writer Agatha Christie in 1934 when he encountered a lack of decent reading material at the railroad station newsstand.
Paperback books, in that era, were mostly pulp fiction with lurid covers -- not the sort of thing a gentleman would be seen reading on the train.
So the next year, Lane founded Penguin, featuring soft-cover editions of serious books, priced at just a sixpence . . . cheap enough to be sold, for a time, from a London vending machine, called the "Penguincubator."
Within a year, Lane had sold three million books -- and Penguin was on its way to becoming a publishing institution.
Not that Penguin always took the easy path.
In 1960, Lane released an edition of "Lady Chatterley's Lover" in defiance of censorship, provoking a landmark obscenity trial that Penguin eventually won . . . while, incidentally, selling two million copies of the book.
Allen Lane died in 1970, but the Penguin lives on, available at bookstores virtually everywhere . . . including railroad stations.
For more info:
- Penguin Books USA
- Penguin Classics
- Penguin Classics: Complete Annotated Catalog
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