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He went on in 1937 to launch a non-fiction arm of the business, Pelican, which was followed in 1940 by Puffin, a children's books division, whose first title was Worzel Gummidge by Barbara Euphan Todd. Sir Allen sold three million books during his first year in business. The first 10 Penguin paperbacks included Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms and Agatha Christie's The Mysterious Affair at Styles. The books were also given a distinctive orange design that, in the 1930s, looked very modern. His secretary came up with the name Penguin and a colleague promptly designed the famous logo after making some sketches at London Zoo.

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The name Penguin came from Sir Allen's wish for a name for the series that was 'dignified but flippant'. He later told Sir Allen: 'I thought you were bound to go bust and I thought I'd take 400 quid off you before you did.' The first, Jonathan Cape, agreed to make available 10 titles at £40 each in the belief that there was little risk involved. He wrote: 'The cheaper books become, the less money is spent on books.'Įventually, though, the publishers relented. They were initially sceptical, as were their authors, with George Orwell publicly urging publishers to have nothing to do with Penguin. He set about asking other publishers for the right to publish some of their titles. Undeterred, Sir Allen reasoned that, at such a low price, people who regularly borrowed books from public libraries might be persuaded to shell out for their own personal copy of a book.

They calculated that, in order to break even at Sir Allen's proposed lower price of sixpence (£1.74 in today's money), the paperbacks would need to sell around 17,000 copies each. In those days, a hardback book typically cost eight shillings (about £27.89 in today's money) and required sales of around 2,000 copies to break even. His fellow directors at Bodley Head dismissed the idea as wildly impractical although they at least agreed to distribute his books. He declared later: 'I wanted the same price as a packet of 10 cigarettes so that no-one could possibly say they couldn't afford them.' He decided that there was a gap in the market for quality works of fiction that could be sold in cheap paperback format, not only at bookshops, but also at tobacconists and railway stations. Waiting on a platform at Exeter St David's station for his train back to London, he browsed stalls at the station for something to read but despaired of the dismal selection of magazines and reprints of Victorian novels that were on offer. Image: Sir Allen Lane, pictured in 1940, founded Penguin with his brothers Dick and John

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