![]() ![]() ![]() It’s the story of a dancer, her life and loves, which had been very popular in its day and twice made into a film. That leaves ‘Carnival’ by Compton Mackenzie, the oldest book in the first batch, having been first published in 1912. Webb’s style had already been parodied by Stella Gibbons in ‘Cold Comfort Farm’, which might have been a more radical choice for Penguin’s ‘first ten’. ![]() Mary Webb, author of ‘Gone to Earth’ wrote what have become known as ‘loam and lovechild’ stories of rural life, aping the style of Thomas Hardy. Young, is another light romantic novel by an author who was bestselling in her day, but has been forgotten by history, as is Number 9. In modern terms it’s almost celebrity journalism. In reality though it’s more an account of the various celebrities he had met. ‘Twenty-five’ by Beverley Nichols, is then an early ‘autobiography’ from someone now best known as a gardening writer. Numbers 5 and 6 are both crime stories, relatively classic ones, but from a genre that was widely available in paperback long before Penguin. Neither has laid any claim to literary posterity. Wodehouse comic novel, while Number 4, ‘Madame Claire’ is a light romantic story, at best middlebrow. That doesn’t sound as if it’s a revolution from the paperbacks that were on offer before Penguin arrived. Described by one recent reviewer as ‘a featherlite meringue of a book … Shelley’s short life as a Hollywood melodrama … Skin-deep characterisation, shamelessly invented conversations and pulse-pounding dramaturgy put the whole experience closer to Downton Abbey than anything resembling scholarly rigour’. It’s an example of a romance biography, which had been a relatively new style in the 1920s (the book was first published in France in 1923, and in Britain in 1924), combining fictionalised elements with a description of Shelley’s life. ‘Ariel’, a biography of Shelley translated from the original French, was surely a serious highbrow book? Well, not really. This is a genuine classic, the reputation of which was already established by 1935 and has only continued to grow since then. There can be no doubt about ‘A farewell to arms’. The mysterious affair at Styles by Agatha Christie.The unpleasantness at the Bellona Club by Dorothy L.These were the first ten Penguins, published in July 1935: ![]() Pre-Penguin Paperbacks from 1905 and from around 1930 There’s enough truth in this one to encourage its adherents, but it needs to be examined critically. In practice though, their first ten books were published on average 12 years after first publication, and for the second ten this rose to 17 years.īut one of the most persistent beliefs is that Penguin were the first to sell quality highbrow literature in paperback, whereas most previous paperbacks were downmarket and trashy. Another claim is that Penguin’s key breakthrough was to publish contemporary literature in paperback, within a year or two of first publication. There was even a series of hardback books at 7d, launched shortly before Penguin. Others think they were the first to sell at 6d, although lots of paperbacks were sold at 6d before Penguin, and at cheaper prices too. Some people seem to think paperbacks didn’t even exist before Penguin, although they had already existed for centuries. In publishing terms it was an absolutely seminal event, and this blog is after all called Paperback Revolution.īut one of the reasons I keep coming back to it is that I still feel it’s an event that is often misunderstood. I keep coming back to the launch of Penguin Books in July 1935. ![]()
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