Radio review: Penguin, Puffin and the Paperback Revolution | My Life in Five Books | The Reunion
We take paperbacks for granted, yet until a chance encounter in a railway bookshop 75 years ago, the only paperbacks you'd find were poor-quality pulp reading. The revolution happened when Sir Allen Lane, then a director of The Bodley Head, was waiting for a train in Exeter and could find nothing worth reading in the station bookshop.
As his son-in-law, poet and children's author Michael Morpurgo, recounts in Penguin, Puffin and the Paperback Revolution, Lane identified a gap in the market for quality, well-designed yet widely affordable paperbacks. Morpurgo, whose stepfather was a Penguin editor, delves into the publisher's archives and meets family members to describe how Lane transformed the country's reading habits.
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Hide AdStaying with books, on Radio Scotland (same time, same day, oddly enough; but accessible on BBC iPlayer), Stuart Cosgrove presents a new, eight-part series, My Life in Five Books, in which he interviews authors about the significant books in their lives. He kicks off on Thursday with children's writer and "most borrowed author of the decade" Dame Jacqueline Wilson. Later literary subjects include A L Kennedy, Andrew O'Hagan and Sir Terry Pratchett.
Rather than measuring her life in books, the feisty Phyllis Montana-LeBlanc divides it into before and after Hurricane Katrina. She is one of five survivors assembled by Sue MacGregor in The Reunion recalling the events of 2005 when 80 per cent of the city disappeared underwater.
This article was first published in The Scotsman on Saturday, August 28