The Man Who Changed the Way We Read
  • Published: 10 July 2025
  • ISBN: 9781405985673
  • Imprint: Penguin Audio
  • Format: Audio Download
  • RRP: $34.00
Categories:

The Man Who Changed the Way We Read

The Story of Allen Lane and Penguin Books

Formats & editions
Paperback
14 Oct 2025
EBook
4 May 2006
Audiobook
10 Jul 2025
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To celebrate our 90th birthday, a reissue of the biography of a phenomenal individual and the story of Penguin Books.

By founding Penguin books and popularizing the paperback, Allen Lane not only changed publishing in Britain, he was also at the forefront of a social and cultural revolution that saw the millions of people given access to what had previously been the preserve of a wealthy few.

In Penguin Special, Jeremy Lewis brings this extraordinary era brilliantly to life, recounting how Allen Lane came to launch his Penguins for the price of a packet of cigarettes; how they became enormously influential in alerting the public to the threat of Nazi Germany; and how Penguin itself gradually became a national institution, like the BBC and the NHS, whilst at the same time challenging the status quo through the famous Lady Chatterley case. Above all, it is the story of how one often fallible, complex man used his vision to change the world.
  • Published: 10 July 2025
  • ISBN: 9781405985673
  • Imprint: Penguin Audio
  • Format: Audio Download
  • RRP: $34.00
Categories:

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About the author

Jeremy Lewis

A former publisher and the deputy editor of the Oldie, Jeremy Lewis has written three volumes of autobiography and biographies of Cyril Connolly, Tobias Smollett and Allen Lane, the founder of Penguin Books. Shades of Greene: One Generation of an English Family, was published by Cape in 2010.

portrait photo of Jeremy Lewis

Also by Jeremy Lewis

Shades of Greene
David Astor
Cyril Connolly
See all

Praise for The Man Who Changed the Way We Read

An invaluable and fascinating account of this country's intellectual and political development

Nick Hornby, Time Out

Both hugely enjoyable to read and surprisingly riveting

Independent on Sunday

Lewis's rakish and racy biography ... tells the story not just of a man, or even a firm, but of a cultural makeover that shaped the world as we know it

Daily Telegraph

Lewis's book is outstanding

London Review of Books