Lane · 1935
Allen Lane and Penguin
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.
It is twenty past eleven on the evening of an unrecorded Sunday in May 1935, on the platform of the Exeter St Davids railway station in Devon, in the cool late-spring night air off the Exe estuary. He is thirty-two years old. He is Allen Lane (born Allen Lane Williams at 33 Wesley Avenue in Bristol on the twenty-first of September 1902, took the Lane surname on his uncle John Lane's deed-poll-and-adoption arrangement of 1919), in his tenth year as a director of the Bodley Head publishing firm at 8 Bow Street in Covent Garden.
He has been at the Agatha Christie cottage at Greenway on the River Dart for the weekend, working on the November 1935 Death in the Clouds manuscript with Christie and her husband Max Mallowan. He is now waiting for the twelve-fifteen sleeper-train to London Paddington and is browsing the Exeter-St-Davids station newsstand for a paperback book to read on the train.
He thinks: the newsstand has thirty-six titles in the paperback-fiction stock. About thirty of them are the Yellow-Book pulp-fiction of the late-Victorian railway-bookstall convention. About four are the Penny-Dreadful detective-and-romance pulp. None of them are the serious-literature that the Bodley-Head, the Hogarth, the Chatto-and-Windus, or the other London-hardback-publishers are bringing out at seven-and-six-pence the eight-shilling hardback retail price.
He thinks: the mass-market reader of 1935 wants the serious-literature but cannot, on the eight-shilling hardback retail price, afford it. The eight-shilling hardback price is, in plain reading, the equivalent of a day's pay for a Birmingham factory-worker.
He thinks: the paperback book at the sixpence price-point is the economic-answer. The Woolworths impulse-purchase range of sixpence is, in 1935, the price of a pack of cigarettes. If the Bodley Head can be persuaded to publish paperback-format reprints of the existing hardback list at sixpence, the mass-market sale will, on the economic projection I am about to make on the back of an envelope on the train, be the million-copy first-year sale.
He returns to the Bodley Head boardroom on the Monday morning with the Penguin proposal. The Bodley Head directors reject it. Lane resigns from the Bodley Head on the third of June 1935, takes his younger brothers Richard and John Lane with him, leases a crypt-warehouse under the Holy Trinity Church on the Marylebone Road, and launches Penguin Books on the thirtieth of July 1935 as a Bodley-Head-imprint operating from the crypt.
The first ten Penguin paperbacks were published on the thirtieth of July 1935. The list was: Ariel (André Maurois), A Farewell to Arms (Ernest Hemingway), Poet's Pub (Eric Linklater), Madame Claire (Susan Ertz), The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club (Dorothy L. Sayers), William (E. H. Young), Gone to Earth (Mary Webb), Carnival (Compton Mackenzie), Twenty-Five (Beverley Nichols), and The Mysterious Affair at Styles (Agatha Christie). The three-colour Penguin-cover-design (orange-and-white for general fiction, green for crime, blue for biography, red for travel, dark-blue for theatre, magenta for the Pelican non-fiction sister-series) was the work of the 21-year-old Edward Young, a Bodley-Head office-junior whom Lane had taken with him. The list-price was sixpence the copy.
The Penguins sold a million copies in the first year. The Bodley Head, on the second-year performance of the Penguin imprint, called in the Penguin debt and forced Lane to buy out the Bodley-Head share in the imprint in 1936. Penguin Books became an independent firm on the twentieth of August 1936. Lane was knighted in 1952. Penguin published the first British-printed Lady Chatterley's Lover in 1960 (the Penguin Lady Chatterley acquittal-trial of November 1960 has its own legend on the Lawrence page).
Sir Allen Lane died at his home at Silverbeck in Buckinghamshire on the seventh of July 1970, sixty-seven years old. He is buried at the Bow Brickhill churchyard. Penguin Books was, by the 2025 publishing-industry rankings, the largest paperback publisher in the English-language world, with about a hundred and fifty million books a year in the international list. The Penguin tradition of uniform three-colour cover-design has been the foundational graphic-design convention of twentieth-century English-language paperback publishing.