Lane

In the spring of 1935, on the platform of Exeter St Davids railway station in Devon, Allen Lane, thirty-two years old, the Bristol-born publisher (a director of the Bodley Head publishing firm since 1925, his uncle John Lane's firm whose name Lane had adopted on the 1919 family deed-poll on his eighteenth birthday), waiting for the late-night sleeper-train back to London after a weekend visit to the novelist Agatha Christie at her Devon home, looked through the station newsstand for a readable book to take on the train journey and could not find one. The newsstand's fiction-stock consisted of about thirty Yellow-Books, Penny-Dreadfuls, and the railway-pulp-fiction that had been the British-railway-bookstall standard since the W. H. Smith 1848 Euston-station opening. There was no serious-literature on the Exeter newsstand at any price-point. Lane spent the train journey back to London thinking about the economic-question: could the paperback book, sold at the sixpence price-point that was the newsstand-and-Woolworths impulse-purchase range, carry serious literature into the mass-market? Within four months he had launched Penguin Books with ten initial titles (the Ariel by André Maurois, A Farewell to Arms by Hemingway, Madame Claire by Susan Ertz, The Mysterious Affair at Styles by Christie, and six others), bound in three-colour Penguin-orange paperback covers, on sale at the Woolworths-and-newsagent network at sixpence (the 1935 price of a pack of cigarettes). The first ten Penguins sold a million copies in the first year. The British-paperback revolution was begun.

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