it was 72 years ago today
The first Penguin book was published on July 30, 1935, the brainchild of publisher Allen Lane. It cost sixpence. Within a year 3,000,000 had been sold, and the demography of reading had changed utterly. Suddenly, for the first time ever, books by people like Maurois, Hemingway, Orwell, GB Shaw became widely affordable - and widely available, because a lynchpin of Lane's vision had been that the books should be sold in railway stations and other outlets that weren't bookshops.
This meant that suddenly the working classes, casual readers and students could afford to own all these books books instead of just borrowing them from the library.
You have to wonder if a similar venture nowadays (you know, involving serious literature for the non-chattering-classes?) would make any impact at all. Like free education, we now take the availability of books completely for granted.*
Thanks to Dave Hill for the prompt (hey, some of us know how to mark these lesser-known anniversaries!). I'd have marked the seventieth, two years ago, but unfortunately I had no blog then. I might still do it, though, in a different way... I've spent various amounts of time in several bookshops leafing through the addictive illustrated monograph, Penguin by Design, published for that anniversary. I might even haul off and buy it one day.
* Of course, if a bookseller came along, possessed of a similar vision... you know.
4 comments:
Three million sixpences, in old money. Now what would that come to? Was it 12 shillings in the pound? You've boggled my mind again, Ms B!
I have a copy of the first Penguin somewhere at my mother's house. Sadly it's the second impression of the first edition...
When I first came to England (on the Ferry from Hook of Holland), I was convinced that all good books were Penguin, others were second rate....
This is the sort of anniversary you become aware of if, like me, you listen to Radio 4 too early in the morning.
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