The first Penguin paperback books were published on 30 July 1935.
In 1934, a young publisher named Allen Lane was returning to London after spending the weekend at the country estate of writer Agatha Christie, when he noticed that all the books on sale at Exeter train station were of poor quality and overpriced. This inspired him to create cheap, well-designed, good-quality books that would be easily available. Within a year he had founded Penguin Books, a paperback publishing revolution that changed the publishing world forever.
At the time, making quality books affordable and accessible to all was a revolutionary idea. Sold through Woolworths and other high street stores, the original 10 Penguin paperbacks sold for sixpence each and they quickly became a sensation. The first batch included books by Ernest Hemingway and Agatha Christie. During its first year, Penguin sold 3 million paperbacks bringing both fiction and non-fiction to the mass market. The early Penguin titles featured simple colour coding: orange denoted fiction, dark blue for biography, and green for crime, but this set was quickly expanded to include red, pink/cerise, purple, gray, and yellow. The colour scheme lasted for decades and is still obvious in second-hand book shops.
Penguin Books is now an imprint of the worldwide Penguin Random House, a conglomerate formed in 2013 by its merger with American publisher Random House.
