“When my first novel appeared in Penguin,” said the writer Malcolm Bradbury, “I regarded it as a step towards canonisation”.
He was surely not alone. For most of us, Penguin books have always been there, from the classroom to the bedside table. But as the publisher celebrates its 90th anniversary this month, it’s easy to forget that before its arrival, it was almost impossible to read a good paperback.
Paperback novels existed, of course, but they were mostly pulp fiction, penny dreadfuls, as disposable as they were garish. “Real books” – literature – were largely preserved in hardback, the durability of the format matching the contents.
Then in 1934, the publisher Allen Lane was returning from a visit to see his author Agatha Christie. At Exeter train station, he wanted something to read on the journey home but couldn’t find anything that was both affordable and worthwhile.
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The idea hit him in a coup de foudre. Quality literature in paperback – a good book for the price of a packet of cigarettes. Lane’s secretary came up with the name Penguin: a “dignified but flippant” symbol.
A conservative publishing industry was sceptical that the idea would work. But – allowing for the benefit of hindsight – of course it was going to work. This was a culture before TV, before hand-held devices, when the people’s choice for portable entertainment was a book. Many people had one on the go at all times, borrowed from lending libraries in Woolworths: so paperback books were a way for publishers to get – literally – into every pocket.
The first set of 12 Penguin books appeared in July 1935, including novels by Ernest Hemingway, Dorothy L Sayers and (the indirect inspiration for the series, so it was only fair) Agatha Christie. The series was indeed a huge hit, shifting three million copies in the first year.
From the start, Penguin drew on Irish writers for its list. The 17th Penguin title, published in October 1935, was Liam O’Flaherty’s Civil War drama The Informer, though not all its Irish titles were so durable. (Does anyone now read St John Ervine’s The Wayward Man, published by Penguin in 1936?)
Soon, Penguin was not just republishing older books but taking on original titles. The publisher showed that books could be mass-market material without aiming for the lowest common denominator. It created a democratisation of reading.
They showed too that books could be timely as well as timeless, with the rapid turnaround of the Penguin Specials series. In 1937, the title Germany Puts the Clock Back sold 50,000 copies in four days, to a public hungry for detailed information on the Nazi threat.
But it also showed that they could not just follow trends, but lead them and initiate the public conversation. Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962), about the dangers of pesticides and the industry’s cover-up, was a clarion call for the environmental movement.
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Most famously, Penguin became part of a campaign itself with the publication of DH Lawrence’s novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Penguin published the book in 1960 to test the new Obscene Publications Act, which allowed so-called obscene work to be published if it had “literary merit”.
The publisher invited prosecution and the authorities were happy to oblige. At the trial numerous authors and academics spoke up for the book (though Enid Blyton turned down the opportunity to do so), and the prosecution bombed.
Penguin’s marketing genius – an important part of its success – came into play: it had 200,000 copies of Lady Chatterley’s Lover ready to distribute (using a different printer, as the usual one refused to handle the book) and managed to get some copies on sale the same day as the acquittal. One month later, the novel had sold two million copies.
Ireland’s own zealous book bans could also create a market that Penguin was keen to satisfy. In 1950 it published a translation of Apuleius’s second-century raunchy Latin satire The Golden Ass, which had been banned in this country.
And Ireland’s once unloved son, James Joyce, has a strong history with Penguin. Allen Lane, who had been the first publisher to produce a UK edition of Ulysses in 1936 (when Penguin was still a sideline for him), reissued the novel as Penguin title number 3,000 in 1969.
He had paid £75,000 for the paperback rights, a record at the time. Within 18 months, it had sold almost half a million copies – an extraordinary figure for a novel as dense, allusive, ambitious and delightful as Joyce’s masterpiece.
More widely, Penguin has a good track record of recognising Ireland as a country that punches well above its weight in literary brilliance. In 1946, to celebrate George Bernard Shaw’s 90th birthday, it published one million books in one day: 100,000 copies each of 10 of his titles. They sold out in six weeks.
Shaw had been a Penguin stalwart since the early days. Its imprint of non-fiction work, Pelican Books, was launched with Shaw’s two-volume The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism, Capitalism, Sovietism and Fascism; the author modestly claimed that these new cheap editions “would be the saviour of mankind”.
Now Penguin continues to publish many of Ireland’s most successful writers, from Marian Keyes and Colm Tóibín to Donal Ryan and Ross O’Carroll-Kelly, and has its own imprint for Irish writing, Sandycove.
But what first comes to mind when many of us think of Penguin books are the classics series: the slightly forbidding black classics, or the edgier, cooler modern classics.
The Penguin Classics series was launched in 1946: its launch title, a new translation of The Odyssey, set out its stall clearly. This was a range to be both high-minded and accessible, to bring the greatest writers in history within reach of the ordinary book buyer.
The Modern Classics followed in 1961, for books that weren’t quite old enough to be classics, but demanded some recognition – or at least some marketing. They were given stylish covers, in line with its aim to be – as former series editor Simon Winder put it – “a series to be enjoyed, rather than something that is good for you”.
But the Classics and Modern Classics ranges have a tricky line to tread: these books not only reflect the literary canon, but they also help to shape it. It took a long time for Penguin to break out of the traditional modern classics mode of white men: Orwell, Waugh, Greene, Fitzgerald. The current publishing director of Penguin Classics, Jessica Harrison, acknowledges this. When reviewing the list for the 90th anniversary celebrations, she told me, she could see that “in the 80s they brought in a lot more women writers” and later “there must have been an editor who was really interested in Japan and Chinese [literature].”
Now, the list looks wider, though even now there are only a handful of Penguin Modern Classics writers from China, and one from North Africa.
But Penguin’s success is not just down to the quality of the books. From the start – see the Penguincubator, a Penguin books vending machine launched in 1937 – the publisher has been a ruthless exploiter of its own intellectual property, with special editions and rejacketed reissues a regular feature of its catalogue. (It currently keeps no fewer than seven editions of Orwell’s Animal Farm in print.)
This approach itself leads to unexpected successes. In 2018, it launched a dirt-cheap (80p in the UK) series of Little Black Classics, including Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’ most famous work – which meant you could buy The Communist Manifesto at the till point in Tesco. As a result, it made the Sunday Times bestseller list.
More recently, Fyodor Dosotevsky has been having a moment, thanks to handsome reissues of his novella White Nights, which became Penguin’s bestselling classic title of 2024, outstripping hardy perennials like Jane Austen.
This ruthless reuse of its titles has its latest manifestation in the Penguin Archive series, a set of 90 short books published this year to celebrate the anniversary, with handsome covers reflecting the various styles of Penguin books over the decades.
The bestselling title of the series when it was launched? Not Austen or Orwell or Fitzgerald, but an Irishman: Bram Stoker, whose short story collection The Burial of the Rats outsold the other 89 titles.
It’s impossible, of course, to cover the full range of Penguin’s history even in a generous spread of 90 titles. But nonetheless, there do seem to be one or two curious omissions. Are there, I asked Jessica Harrison, any authors she regrets not including in the Archive?
“It did feel odd,” she said after a long pause, “to be without [James] Joyce.” Not half.
