What Publishers Can Learn from Allen Lane

Publishing Perspectives has a brief profile on Allen Lane, the creator of, amongst other developments in book publishing, the Penguincubator.

From the piece...

When Allen Lane produced the popular paperback in 1934, his breakthrough was not in the creation of the paperback — they had had been around in various, if poor quality, formats for a number of years. His innovation was recognizing a novel context in which people were reading, or wanting to read. The legend goes that the realization came at a railway station. I like to imagine Lane in his expensive, well-cut suit — he was a famously well-dressed man — idly perusing the newspaper stand at Adlestrop (actually Exeter), and noticing the bored gazes of his fellow passengers as they waited for their endlessly delayed train. A lightbulb goes on.

Lane’s other invention, alongside the cheap, quality paperback, was the Penguincubator, first installed outside Henderson’s (the “Bomb Shop”) at 66 Charing Cross Road, which signaled his intention to take the book beyond the library and the traditional bookstore, into railway stations, chain stores and onto the streets. It is worth noting, given publishers’ frequent timidity in this area, that this really annoyed booksellers. (Lane’s lack of trepidation is an important part of this story; worth noting, too, that he was the first English publisher of James Joyce’s Ulysses, at the Bodley Head, despite the widespread contemporary fear of prosecution for obscenity.)