DAVID ADAMS looks back at Penguin’s beginnings…
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Penguin celebrates 75 years. |
It’s 75 years since Penguin Books was founded in the UK with the idea of democratising great literature – making it readily available to everyone at an affordable price.
Founder Allen Lane reportedly coming up with the idea for the Penguin paperbacks when travelling home after a weekend in which he’d visited Agatha Christie in Devon and finding a lack of cheap, good quality fiction at the train stations.
The first 10 books, costing as little as six pence (the price of a pack of cigarettes at the time) were published on 30 July, 1935, and the initial authors included Ernest Hemingway, Dorothy L. Sayers and Agatha Christie.
By March 1936, a million books had been printed and within a year of the launch, they’d sold their first million. The books were initially sold in three different colors – orange for fiction, green for crime and blue for biographies.
It’s estimated that as many as 100,000 different editions of the books have since been released and Penguins are now published in countries across the world including the UK, US, Canada, South Africa, India, China and Australia. There are currently more than 3,600 Penguin Books and 1,500 Penguin Classics in print.
While Lane (who apparently also came up with the idea of the oddly name ‘Penguincubator’, a vending machine for train stations which would dispense his books – whether any were ever made remains a matter of debate) expected the books to be disposable, 75 years on, there’s a thriving community of Penguin collectors and even a dedicated club – the Penguin Collectors Society.
If you have a word you’d like to know the origins of, simply send an email to origins@sightmagazine.com.au.
