Issue #0

Penguin Portrait

Plot

Although founded at what seemed to be the worst of times - in a period of deep recession and with war looming - Allen Lane's gamble succeeded magnificently. Penguin made books a truly mass medium for the first time. With Allen Lane as the energetic catalyst, an extraordinarily talented band of editors presided over the growth of the Penguin list - Pelicans, Penguin Specials, Penguin Classics, Puffins, the Buildings of England series - which has since formed part of the reading experience of almost everyone.This book, drawn directly from the editorial archive and first-hand accounts, charts the formative Penguin years with correspondence to and from authors like Bernard Shaw, George Orwell, Dorothy L. Sayers, Graham Greene and Robert Graves, and through the publishing events that made the newspaper headlines, most famously the Lady Chatterley trial in the 1960s.