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 paperback