90 years of Penguin Books: The origin myth that may not be true
The penguin, the myth, the legend. As the publisher celebrates 90 years of books, Anna Moloney takes a look at the company that revolutionised reading (sort of)
In 1934, on his way to London after visiting his good friend Agatha Christie, the young publisher Allen Lane stopped at the station bookstall at Exeter St Davids, saw all the books on sale were low quality and overpriced, and thought: that simply won’t do. Within a year, he’d founded Penguin Books and single-handedly set off the paperback revolution that would fundamentally change the publishing world forevermore.
Or so he’d like you to think. After all, Allen Lane was in the business of storytelling and he’d be damned not to sew his own corporate myth.
As it happens, Penguin wasn’t the first publisher to produce cheap paperbacks. It wasn’t even the first bird-named one to. Rather, Lane had caught wind of Albatross Books, a German publisher with a distinctive look: simple typographical covers stamped with its bird mascot. Thank god imitation is the greatest form of flattery.
From there, Lane grew his own literary avian empire – Penguins (classics), King Penguins (monographs), Pelicans (non-fiction), Puffins (children’s) – until running out of Ps and, as it celebrates its 90th anniversary this year, the publisher still parrots this .
“Allen really had a campaign to make himself seem like a publishing genius. But he was more of a business genius,” Stuart Kells, author of Penguin and The Lane Brothers: The Untold Story of a Publishing Revolution, told Morning Wire. Even more concerning for Penguin fans though: he wasn’t a literary person at all. Allen’s favourite book? A weight loss guide.
Mascots and modernism
Even so, Lane did change the reading world. Set at the same price as a pack of cigarettes and the first books to be sold in Woolworths, Penguin books made reading accessible. The penguin mascot itself, a choice reportedly inspired by a visit to the recently built Lubetkin Penguin Pool in London Zoo, spoke to this in form and function.
Not only were penguins “in the zeitgeist” (black and white = 1930s modernist chic), so were mascots, according to modern British historian Richard Hornsey. Amid mass manufacturing, in which the actual makeup of products became less distinguishable from one another, fostering brand identity and consumer loyalty by other means became paramount. Mascots were a popular method. The Penguin penguin, pictured varyingly slipping around, donning its characters’ clothes and settling back with a good book, was a character both humble and refined, with an air of English self-mockery which gave it perfect consumer appeal.
As testament to its success, unlike other publishers, Penguin commandeered whole shelves in bookshops: ‘FAMOUS BOOKS, FAMOUS AUTHORS’, advertised the sign of one London Penguin kiosk pictured in 1936. The authors’ names themselves weren’t enough of a pull: it was the black and white birds marching through the spines – and the stamps of approval they gave – that were most important.
P-P-P-Performative Penguins?
Hornsey goes further, suggesting the mascots also provide a sense of identification for the reader. “When you go up to the bookshelf and you see 40 penguins all lined up… it’s offering you this almost utopian version of some future society in which we’re all well-read penguins. As if when you take your Penguin off [the shelf], you’re becoming a penguin yourself, and joining this well-cultivated society,” he says. He’s only half joking. Even today to flash a Penguin Classic on the Tube is to signal casual cultivation.
Indeed, 90 years on from their humble origins, those little penguins now waddle beaks tipped up, with time having afforded them quite the sense of prestige. The Penguin Collectors Society, which states its aim as to “challenge the perceptions – held even by Allen Lane and the creators of Penguin – that their books were essentially ephemeral” is one example of such gear change.
When I speak to Andrew Malin, who has collected over 7,500 first editions, he tells me he is driven by nostalgia and an appreciation for Penguin’s original democratic spirit. How many has he read? “I have no idea, but not very many,” he admits. I think of Hornsey’s image of penguin utopia, and wonder if Malin feels himself there.
Anna Moloney is Morning Wire Magazine’s books editor