First Penguin paperback
- Who
- The Mysterious Affair at Styles, by Agatha Christie, Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway, Ariel, by Andre Maurois, Madame Claire, by Susan Ertz, Twenty-Five by Beverly Nichols, Poet's Pub, by Eric Linklater, The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club, by Dorothy L Sayers, William, by E H Young, Gone to Earth, by Mary Webb, Carnival, by Compton Mackenzie
- What
- First
- Where
- United Kingdom
- When
- 30 July 1935
The first Penguin paperbacks were a set of 10 books published by The Bodley Head on 30 July 1935 at a price of 6d (equivalent to around £2 in 2021). The books in this initial batch, which included Agatha Christie's The Mysterious Affair at Styles and Ernest Hemingway's Farewell to Arms, would go on to sell an average of 60,000 copies each in their first year. At the time, a typical print run for a piece of hardback fiction was roughly 3,000 copies, and each book cost around 8 shillings (equivalent to about £30 in 2021).
The cost of clearing the rights and printing the books, plus the 2d of each sale that went to the retailer, meant that each Penguin edition would have to sell 25,000 copies just for the publishers to break even. The publisher who oversaw the creation of these books, Allen Lane, soon split Penguin off as a separate company.
Allen Lane was not the first publisher to attempt a run of high quality mass market paperbacks, but his was the first to achieve significant success. The branding and overall philosophy of the new Penguin imprint was heavily influenced by an earlier series of books, published under an imprint called The Albatross, which were printed in Germany in 1932.