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The sixpenny revolution
Cheap books with paper covers were not new in the 1930s. In the nineteenth century, British publishers had sold inexpensive novels with brightly coloured covers at railway stations, so that travellers had something to read on long journeys, and in the United States, "dime novels" had been popular for decades. But these books had a poor reputation. They were usually badly printed, and they were associated with sensational stories rather than serious literature.
Albatross, a publisher founded in Hamburg in 1932 to sell English-language books in continental Europe, showed that a paperback could be both cheap and attractive. Its books were all the same convenient size, they were printed on good paper, and their covers used a simple design in which each colour indicated a different kind of book.
Three years later, a British editor named Allen Lane took the idea much further. According to a story Lane often told, he was waiting for a train in Exeter and could find nothing worth reading on sale at the station, only expensive new hardbacks and cheap magazines. He decided to publish good books, both fiction and non-fiction, at the same price as a packet of cigarettes: sixpence.
Other publishers were doubtful. If good books were sold so cheaply, they argued, people would stop buying expensive editions, and authors would earn less. Lane needed to sell enormous numbers to make any profit at all. The breakthrough came when a national chain of shops, Woolworths, agreed to stock the first Penguin titles. Within a year, Penguin had sold millions of books.
Penguin borrowed the Albatross colour system: orange covers for fiction, green for crime, and dark blue for biography. The books became a familiar sight in pockets and bags, and the brand helped to persuade a generation of readers that serious books were for them too. In the United States, Pocket Books followed in 1939, selling paperbacks for twenty-five cents.
Penguin's boldest moment came in 1960, when it published an unedited edition of D. H. Lawrence's novel Lady Chatterley's Lover and was taken to court under a law against obscene publications. The jury found Penguin not guilty, and the trial was widely seen as a turning point for freedom of expression in Britain. Millions of copies were sold in the months that followed.
