From the paperback revolution to the obscenity trial that made Lady Chatterley’s Lover famous, we explore how Penguin turned the UK into a nation of readers as we celebrate our 90th birthday. Host Rhianna Dhillon speaks to Kate Mosse, international bestselling author, activist and founder director of the Women’s Prize for Fiction and Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction, and Zainab Juma, Penguin’s Head of Brand, about Penguin’s origin story, mission, and cultural influence over the past 90 years.
Celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books
Click the button below to listen to this episode or continue scrolling to explore the books discussed.
Alongside the Penguin titles you can explore below, Kate, Zainab and Rhianna also mentioned:
The Works of Edith Wharton
The Intelligent Women's Guide to Capitalism, Soviet Fascism
Explore the books discussed in this episode
The Penguin Podcast Special transcript
Rhianna Dhillon:
Hello, I'm Rihanna Dillon, and this is Ask Penguin, the podcast series from Penguin Books. And this episode is a very special one because we have a birthday to celebrate. 2025 marks the year that Penguin books turns 90. And we at the Penguin Podcast wanted to explore some of the fascinating ways that Penguin has turned the UK into a nation of readers. So Penguin was founded by Alan Lane who started with a simple, but at the time controversial idea that quality literature should cost no more than a 10 pack of cigarettes. Despite skepticism from publishers and booksellers, Alan Lane was proved right. Within a year, 3 million penguins had made it to reader's shelves. What an absolute hero. But that was really just the beginning of Penguin's mission. Today, penguin makes books for everyone because a book can change anyone. With me in the studio are two people who can both speak to the power of reading in different ways. As regular listeners know, we like to tap into the amazing knowledgeable team behind the scenes at Penguin, and we've wanted to get this particular person on the podcast for ages, and she has always alluded us. Until now, Zainab Juma, welcome.
Zainab Juma:
Hello, you finally got me.
Rhianna Dhillon:
I am so thrilled that we've caught you in our little penguin net. So Zainab, you are the head of brand at Penguin, so can you explain a little bit about what that actually means?
Zainab Juma:
So we've got lots of teams who make sure that we publish our books really well and they reach all the right people they're supposed to reach. And then right in the middle of it all is our Penguin brand team. So my job is to look after the penguin, and that basically means making sure that the penguin is able to do what it's always done, which is help people find the things that they need in a book to help bring lots of ideas together to help people understand things. It's your path into finding your next read.
Rhianna Dhillon:
Nice little tagline. I like it. And also joining us alongside Zainab, we have the international bestselling author, Kate Mosse, whose titles include Labyrinth and the Taxidermist’s Daughter. Kate is the founder director of the Women's Prize, which celebrates and platforms women writers, and she supported, mentored and advocated for so many authors throughout her own career. In recognition of this incredible work, Kate has been awarded a CBE for her services to literature, women and charity for her ongoing commitment to charitable work and the women's prize. Kate was recently awarded the British Book Award for Social Impact in celebration of Allan Lane, a prize supported by Penguin. So congratulations, Kate.
Kate Mosse:
Thank you.
Rhianna Dhillon:
Welcome to the show.
Kate Mosse:
It was great actually. It was a really big surprise. I knew there was something up. Because I said, I'm not going to the British Book Awards. And everybody went, no, you've got to go. And I said, well, I've got a board meeting for something else and I'm not up for anything. And they went, no, no, no, you have to go. You must. And then someone said, don't have any wine.
Rhianna Dhillon:
What are you like when you’re on the wine?
Kate Mosse:
Well, you see, one Glass and I’m chatty. So I knew something was happening, but I didn't know what it was. So it was a really lovely surprise actually.
Rhianna Dhillon:
Oh, that's so good. I love that. I've got so many questions for you both, but I'm going to start by asking you how has Penguin inspired you as readers and writers? Zainab, do you want to start us off?
Zainab Juma:
I mean, you kind of grow up with a lot of Penguin whether you want it or not, right? You kind of go through your school curriculum and your set texts are usually penguin classics. You get used to sort of having this little emblem in your pocket or in your bag at all times. But the first book that I really chose to read, I would say as an adult, was a copy of White Teeth that I picked up in an Oxfam bookshop in Pinner on a random lunch time.
Kate Mosse:
Rich detail.
Zainab Juma:
Yes, great detail, says the novelist. Thank you so much. I'm going to carry that. It was just so memorable. It was the first book that really spoke to me. And then several years later after university where I naturally did an English degree because I needed to have books as part of every day of my life. A role came up at Penguin, which I did not get, but I cited that particular moment of finding that book and reading it and it got me through the door to have a conversation with actually one of your former podcast guests, I think Simon Prosser.
Rhianna Dhillon:
Oh yeah. Lovely Simon,
Zainab Juma:
Who is just the best. And I've never forgotten that experience and that book and that little penguin in the corner and being able to kind of get my foot through the door at Penguin as a reader who'd loved a penguin book.
Rhianna Dhillon:
Good old White Teeth. What about you, Kate?
Kate Mosse:
Similar, but obviously many centuries before. I think the thing is that when you are at school, as you say, you have your set texts and you read those, and then when you are released out into the world, it's that thing of starting to read for yourself. And I was also going to do an English degree, but I was very conscious of having had a very narrow band of reading essentially. No translated fiction, pretty much no American Fiction.
And so between finishing A Levels, and I had a year off where I was working in a cafe to earn some money and things before I went up, I did basically read my way through a lot of penguin classics that were translated fiction because I'd never done that. That was the thing. And American fiction as well. So discovered people like Wharton. And I think that that was it, that there was a sense of whether you liked the book or not, this was an example of quality and this was about the canon, the literary canon. Now obviously I spent the rest of my career saying the Canon needs to be a bit broader, guys, where are the women? But it was that the idea that even if I didn't enjoy it. Did I enjoy reading Faust? Not really. Not that much. Did I enjoy reading Man and Superman? Not so great, but was it important that I did? Absolutely. And so that was my relationship with Penguin, which was, okay, I can read my way through as many of these as I want, and then I will have a sense of world literature from the beginning.
Rhianna Dhillon:
That's so interesting as well that you sort of say, did you enjoy it? Is that the point? Because is it always the point that you have to love everything that you read? And is it okay to pick up something reluctantly and sort of force your way through it? Do you think it's worth forcing your way through a book to finish it?
Kate Mosse:
Yeah, always. Everything is informed by what's gone before, whether it's a deliberate rejection of it or a homage to it or whatever. So just knowing that whole arc, and particularly for me, obviously as a feminist activist, the ways in which women are prevented from writing and not allowed to publish. So then when you read a quite old text and know quite how much that must have taken out of that woman to even get it into print. So I think it's that it's about the history of literature. It's not about your personal taste. I mean, do I put books down that I'm not enjoying in the modern day? Yeah, because they’re not all classics, let me tell you.
Rhianna Dhillon:
So I gave a very brief account of how Penguin books started out in the introduction, but it is such a fascinating story and one that I think could make a really good film. So this is the phrase that I've heard a lot around the office, Paperback revolution. What does that actually mean?
Zainab Juma:
Okay, so, rewind 91 years as someone who would like to read a book. For the most part, you have two choices. You have a beautiful woodcut jacketed hardback that's going to cost you two weeks wages or you're going to have a really cheap paperback, but the person who's published it, their margins are really tight and they can't really afford to licence anything good.
So they can't really afford to pay the rights to publish the things that you really want to read. And right in the middle of that is where Allen Lane steps in. So a few people have tried this before, but not to much success possibly because they tried in the wrong circumstances, but also Allen Lane had a lot of hustle. So he finds himself in 1934 just waiting on a station platform in Exeter, having been to see some friends including Agatha Christie, which is quite a flex. And he pops into the Stationers on the platform and those are his two choices. He's like, well, no, I want neither of these things. So he spends at the time a four hour journey back into London on that train, just mulling on what can be done. He thinks, well, I'm already in the industry. He was on the board at the Bodley Head at the time, which was run by his uncle, and by the time he gets back to London, he's sort of quite resolved to take a punt on something a little different, on something that costs, as he put it, about the same as a 10 pack of cigarettes. So a nice little pocket luxury, but actually of good books of writing that is worth reading.
And one year later that he is. And I suppose the paperback revolution part of it is that there's press cuttings from about a year after the original books came out, the first 10, and the subsequent lists, which grew really rapidly within a year, 3 million of those six months paperbacks had sold and they were being bought by people who had not been regularly buying books before. And it democratised reading through something as simple as thinking about an affordable format. It's not like the writing had changed, it was still what was being published, but it was just being published in a way that assumed, I think generously and correctly, that people did actually want to read, that the establishment position that only certain people wanted to read and therefore it was held at a certain status and therefore it had to be a hardback because paperbacks were sort of garbage. It's like, no, everyone has a reader in them somewhere. You just actually have to make it accessible to them.
Kate Mosse:
And it's also part of women's history actually. It's not usually framed in that way, but it is because what had happened, obviously after the first World War Society had changed very differently. Women were starting to work in what we would call white collar roles. Women were now finally allowed to get degrees even though they'd been able to study before Cambridge held out until the forties. But Oxford had started to get degrees in London even earlier than that in the late teens and the twenties. And the vast majority of particularly fiction readers were as they still are now, women. And there was a revolution going on within libraries at this moment, the Great Florence Boot, who is the wife of Mr. Boot, as in Boots, firstly said, you know what? In our chemist we should sell makeup. And you know what, we should start a lending library. And millions of books were being borrowed from Florence Boots Lending Library up and down the country. There were paperbacks in there. And so it's exactly what you say Zainab about a democratisation. It was about this new generation of independent women who were like, I'm borrowing these books. Do you know what? I'm going to buy a book?
And so it is part of an enormous change in women's lives and social lives. So I think you exactly nail the point. People had tried it before and it hadn't worked. His timing was impeccable.
Zainab Juma:
Yeah. I mean, even two years later, the first Pelican Books. Pelicans were the quite deliberate nonfiction arm, sort of university 1 0 1 level of topics that would interest the public. The first Pelican book was a double volume by George Bernard Shaw called The Intelligent Women's Guide to Capitalism, Soviet Fascism, and something else that he added at the time that I've forgotten. And there were issues with that approach. I think the idea was that the topic needed dumbing down, but regardless, let's put that aside for a hot second. There was still an idea that women would in fact have an interest in those topics. And that's quite remarkable.
Kate Mosse:
Which is why we're so thrilled to win the first one of these, because actually it's a big moment in acknowledgement of the new woman as it were. But it's normally not talked about in those terms, but it's really significant.
Rhianna Dhillon:
So that was post-World War I, what happened during World War II
Zainab Juma:
Paper rationing happened.
Rhianna Dhillon:
Yes,
Zainab Juma:
That was tough for all sorts of publishers by the time paper rationing kicked in. So the way that paper rationing for publishers was assigned is that your paper rations were based on the volumes that you were publishing at before the rations kicked in. And the thing that Allan Lane had done is accelerate the business so fast and decided from the outset, in order to make his six months margins actually work, to be a mass market publisher. So by the time paper rations kick in, he's getting the most, which allowed him to do a few things. So one was to acquire things that he knew would die during World War II.
So he bought John Lehman's new writing anthology and turned that into Penguin New Writing, which he then published 40 volumes of over the next 10 years. It would not have survived without Allen Lane acquiring it. And it also meant that he had the paper rations to start things like the Forces Book Club Or the Prisoners of war Book Clubs. So he was able to publish books at subsidy to go via the government out to Soldiers on the Frontline.
Kate Mosse:
I mean, he was a visionary. I mean, absolutely extraordinary.
Zainab Juma:
I had no idea that he was such a gambler. I mean, even the first 10, he sort of went back to the Bodley Head board and pitched it, and they were sort of like, yeah, it could work, but it's not a risk we're willing to take. The Bodley Head were struggling at the time. Now, of course, a thriving imprint under Penguin, but at the time they were having a bit of a time of it. And they said, you can do it and you can do it here at the office, but in your own time or with your own money. So the original 10 and the first year of publishing really was published under the Bodley Head. But it was Allen Lane’s capital that went into it because no one believed.
Kate Mosse:
There's never been a great idea in publishing where it hasn't been someone going, okay, this is a challenge. Nobody says, oh, that's a great idea. It always to tell you it's a tough idea. It's always risk until it pays off.
Rhianna Dhillon:
So if you've heard the podcast before, you'll know that we have amazing listeners and they always send in the best questions. And I want to start with one quickly because this is something that I've always wondered, and you've mentioned Pelican Books, and in my head that's immediate, that is blue and white. But somebody has asked, I would love to know more about the design of the original Orange and White book jacket and why Penguin was chosen for a mascot, which is, I mean, everybody wants to know
Zainab Juma:
What a fateful decision, huh? Yeah. I mean animals are just like, they're good emblems for things. There was a young designer, he's called Edward Young, he was like 21 years old, and then Allan Lane’s secretary is a woman called Joan Coles. And the story goes, and as with all of these things that are 91 years ago, and I'm hoping that it happened closely to what we understand to have happened, but a late night conversation between Allan Lane and Edward Young and Joan Coles, and they're batting around ideas. They batted around, I think a dolphin. And when Joan Cole suggested a penguin, Allen Lane reportedly paused and said, I like it. It has a certain dignified flippancy. That so should be true, shouldn't it? Wouldn't that be great? I am holding it as a truth. No one can tell me otherwise. And shortly after Allan Lane dispatches Edward Young to London Zoo to draw a penguin and bring it back as their logo, what a remarkable piece of work for a 21-year-old designer. But an awful lot of it was practical as well. So these books needed to be replicable. They needed to be colours, because the idea was to keep the cost down to six months. So you couldn't have an illustrated approach. You couldn't even really have a custom approach. It needed to be a system that was going to work across whatever you were publishing. So the only variation really was the colours. So orange was for fiction, green was for crime, et cetera, et cetera. So that was it,
Kate Mosse:
Which is actually brilliant. Again, brilliant brand marketing, isn't it?
Rhianna Dhillon:
Absolutely. The simplicity of it.
Kate Mosse:
Yeah.
Rhianna Dhillon:
Okay. Kate, you have built an incredibly successful career in the industry. When did you start out, first of all?
Kate Mosse:
Well, I started in publishing. So I left university like many people and women of my age, it was just assumed you'd be a secretary regardless of where you'd gone, what you did, what your degree, it was just assumed you'd be a secretary.
Rhianna Dhillon:
It's still mind boggling at that.
Kate Mosse:
No, no, but we must remember that many things are brilliant and much better than they were. There's a great doom and gloom quite rightly at the moment. But there's lots of stuff that is fantastic. But nobody typed except for secretaries, that kind of thing. And so I signed up with a secretarial agency when I left university and was sent. There wasn't the idea of diversity and making it possible for anybody who'd be interested. So I was there just typing away and somebody left and they said, do you want a job? And I went, okay. It was this rather random thing.
And I enjoyed it enormously, became an editorial assistant, then an editor, and did all of those kinds of things. And then I was offered a big job and about eight, nine years in, and I had a 2-year-old at the time, and I was expecting my second child. And I realised at that moment that I had to ask myself a really tough question. Do you want to be the CEO of a publishing company? If you don't, Kate, you've got to be brave enough to jump now. And I jumped and it was concurrent with setting up the women's prize and then having a baby and writing my first book. So these things all happened. So we went from having a proper job, goodness, to no job, no money and all of these things. But of course, as I started to be an author, which was really much later on, but very much the women's prize, I knew how it all worked. I knew a lot of people. And of course when I was setting the prize up, that was exactly it, that I just went to everybody I knew and said, okay, what do you think?
What do we need? What do authors need? So very circuitous. So I became a successful author, an overnight success in my mid forties. So this was not a new thing, and it was my fifth book Labyrinth that became a big book. So that was great. But I knew therefore that it's luck. It's not to say that I'm not proud of the novel or because, and I'm very much obviously about everybody should be proud of the thing they've done and not be self-deprecating, particularly women going, oh no, it was nothing. But at the same time, if you've worked in publishing, there are brilliant books that never get the wind beneath their sails, which is nothing to do with you it's what you say to every other young writer, whoever they are coming up or older writer starting out, is that the only thing in your control is the text. Everything else is out of your control. Control, which means that you protect your joy of writing and you celebrate when it goes well, but when it goes badly, you go, that's a shame. But you don't let it make you despair that your writing isn't good enough or any of those kind of things. So it's great being middle aged when the great thing happens to you, rather than it being when you're 20 because you don't take it as seriously.
Rhianna Dhillon:
Yeah, you've lived by that point and learnt that there are other things in life. And how do you think that the publishing industry has changed even from when you worked in it to now? I know you said that obviously things everywhere have changed, but specifically in publishing.
Kate Mosse:
I think that there is great work going on in terms of diversity of the people who work in publishing. It's not just ethnicity, although that it was a fundamental thing. It wasn't hard for women to be published when I set up the women's prize if they look like me. And that was part of the reason I set up the women's prize, that 60% of novels authored were authored by women, and 75% of novels published were bought by women, but fewer than 9% of books ever shortlisted for literary prizes were by women. So it wasn't an issue of access to market, it was an issue of honouring and respecting the work as literature.
But I would say also class is very important. I would say geography is very important. And I would say that there is much less snobbery about genre than there used to be. There was always the idea, my first couple of books were novels, and when I started to, from Labyrinth onwards, have that level of success, it became kind of almost this myth, oh, your first two books were literary? No, no, no, they just didn't sell. There was this kind of conflation that if you sold a lot, it actually meant your book was really rubbish. My god, there was that real attitude of that. It's very interesting now watching how the Big Five are these incredible professional organisations and there's a lot more debate about all these different things, about whose story you're allowed to tell, who's going to publish, what are your responsibilities in the broader world.
Rhianna Dhillon:
Zainab, we've got another question. Jeremy has got in contact to say how much he loves the book vending machine installed at Exeter train station. There's one also downstairs in the Penguin office. It's very exciting. It looks so cool. I love that it's not just novelty to rock up to a vending machine and get a book. It's become like a viral sensation. So where did that idea to dispense books from vending machines come from and what other fun things have been created for people to access books where they might not usually find them?
Zainab Juma:
So the vending machine at Exeter, which is at St. David's station, which is where Allan Lane had his unfortunate lack of book buying thing. So the location was very much inspired by that moment. There's already an orange plaque at Exter as well, celebrating that moment. So we thought it’ll be brilliant to add a little bit to it. But in the spirit of experimentation that Allan Lane seemed to embody, I cannot remember the actual year, but pretty early on, I think in the first three years, he was always just looking for new ways for people to get books. So he installed a custom built book vending machine called the Penguincubator.
Rhianna Dhillon:
One more time for the people in the back.
Zainab Juma:
Penguincubator, just the most awkward portmanteau. And there is a brilliant photo of him operating it in the… we've giving you the giggles with the word penguin incubator. I love it so much. It's quite the word, isn't it? It's so many syllables in one. Yeah, there's a wonderful photo in the archive of Alan Lane operating it on press day and being photographed. But it's quite remarkable. It sort of looks like one of those old school cigarette vending machines. So there are these kind of slots arranged and a kind of chevron, you can just see that. You can totally imagine how you'd sort of insert a coin and turn a dial and something would go. Dealers choice, which is whatever came out, no idea. Because unfortunately it is nowhere to be found now.
Rhianna Dhillon:
The Penguincubator. What other things have you experimented with in terms of with the Alan Lane Spirit perspective? Getting books out to people in unusual ways.
Zainab Juma:
Well actually, so Kate, you're talking about the disparity between women sort of being the lifeblood of the publishing industry, both as writers and readers, and then the sort of inverse in terms of reward and recognition. A few years ago, we actually ran a pop-up shop for a week called Like A Woman, and there was a bookshop to mark International Women's Day. And I remember using those specific statistics. To put the thing together and to pitch it. And to talk about it in the press. Oh, so we put together a bookshop that only had books written by women, but I remember seeing, particularly on the Thursday, which is International Women's Day, a lot of families coming in and it wasn't all women either. It wasn't just moms bringing their daughters, it was men coming in with their young sons to talk to them about what that space was about. So there's sort of the playful in terms of really boiling down to a problem or even an opportunity to really make space for something important. And then something that we're doing this year. I’m afraid applications have now been closed. And the finalists have been selected, and I have no idea who they are, so don't ask me, but we are installing around the country, 90 little book stops. So I dunno if you've seen just walking through your neighborhood, someone might have a little box or a shelf out of the front of their house or maybe in the station or something where you can leave a book and take a book. So we are helping 90 different people in their communities to install a little book box. So there's, there's going to be lots of little penguin bookshelves.
Rhianna Dhillon:
So do you send the books out to them?
Zainab Juma:
Yes. Well, so it'll be up to the guardians of those books to maintain 'em in the long term, but we will be rocking up and installing it and pre-populating it with a first selection of books. And then after that, it's for the community to make of it what they will.
Rhianna Dhillon:
Brilliant. So it's not temporary. It's not just there for 90th year. What a great idea.
Zainab Juma:
So we're doing that in partnership with little free libraries. And we've had the most incredible applications through.
Rhianna Dhillon:
But this is it, right? The idea of community and reading is something that I think you go through peaks and troughs with when you are a reader and you go through quieter moments. And just working on the podcast has reintroduced me to a community of readers. And I've really noticed now that I'm reading so much more than I have been in recent years, I have so much more to talk to my friends about. We're all reading, we're all swapping books, we're all swapping recommendations. Kate, as founder of the Women's Prize, how has that community been impacted and how beneficial is it? How many readers are you reaching?
Kate Mosse:
Well, I mean, we now reach millions of people every year because exactly the same thing that you have to kind of innovate and engage with the new technologies and move things out there. So the idea was always to honour, to celebrate and to amplify exceptional writing by women for the benefit of every reader. So it was a prize that was founded to look outwards to readers, much like Alan Lane actually doing it. So that was why we never had a black tie dinner where everybody patted each other on the back. That wasn't the point. The sense was to provide not an alternative cannon, but to expand the canon. It is that wonderful comment, I'm sure you know it, by the great Shirley Chisholm, who was an American democratic politician. She was the first black woman to run for the nomination of the Democratic Party to run for president. And she said, if they won't give you a seat at the table, bring your own folding chair. And that's kind of the spirit behind the women's prizes. Let's just get a bigger table and more chairs and let's add in all of these things. So firstly, the idea just from the long list, the shortlist and the winners of an expanding canon, a body of work that's available, but as time has gone on, of course, extending that to our podcast, which is book shelfie, to all of the other things we do, our research projects, our educational projects, our literacy projects, and particularly our mentoring projects, which is the stage that we need to be involved with. So we have a big programme called Discoveries, which is we get more than 3000 entries every year. It's for an unpublished woman writer who submits up to 10,000 words, because you can't just shine a spotlight on the books that are published because you've got to go further back and say to any woman who's got a story inside her, this could be you too, don't think it's not you, that your ideas are not as valid as anybody else's. So that's what we've been doing for 30 years now in fiction and now for two years in nonfiction, is extending being the place that women, readers, writers, educators, librarians can come and get this huge body of work. And obviously technology has made a great deal of difference. So the podcast is heard by millions and millions and millions of people every year. Obviously every single platform event we do, all of the mentoring we do online, millions of people engage with it. So it's much bigger. We're a charity now.
It’s much bigger than just, every year, these are the books you read. And of course, because we honour living writers, a way of getting many of those extraordinary writers of the past who couldn't ever have been submitted for the Women's Prize of fiction or the Women's prize for non-fiction, and shining a spotlight on those classic texts as well, has been part of it. But exactly what you are saying, Zainab about community. Everything about the way the Women's Prize works as a trust, as a charity, is about insofar as you can do it, and it's important to take ourselves out of the equation, is to be setting things up that other people then own. So using the voice and the platform of the Women's Prize to go, what about this? Here's some stuff by, nothing to do with us now, because that is really important. And particularly with our reading groups programme, we do make platforms for people to speak for themselves. That's the aim.
Rhianna Dhillon:
That's a great aim. Obviously publishing is not without its controversy. So Zainab, what is the most controversial book that Penguin has ever published?
Zainab Juma:
I mean, there are so many options. First thought was Lady Chatterley’s Lover. A hundred percent. So the infamous publication of this book has kind of gone down in history and it's had effects on us that I think we can't even recognise or fathom. But so in 1959, the government at the time passed something called the Obscene Publications Act.
So there were already sort of restrictions and censorship laws in place, but the Obscene Publications Act sort of extended that law to books for the first time. And the full complete and unexpiated version of Lady Chatterley's Lover had never been published in the UK before. It contains many, many four letter words, which had kind of not made it into the UK before. And Allen Lane decided in 1960 to quite deliberately challenge the Obscene Publications Act. So this wasn't a matter of taking a risk and hoping to fly under the radar. This was a direct challenge to the government.
Rhianna Dhillon:
He didn't like a quiet life, did he? Alan Lane?
Zainab Juma:
Oh no, I cannot imagine what he was like to work for. I'm grateful to him and glad that he's in the rearview mirror, to be honest, as a penguin employee. So the book is printed, it starts to go out the door, and then one day the police knock on the door at Penguin books, turn up with a notice of prosecution and confiscate all the copies at the office. And a few months later, we're up on trial, we're in court. So there was a really interesting thing that happened literally in an opening argument. So the barrister of the prosecution kind of opens up his case and he quite infamously asked the judge and jury, is this the type of book you would wish your wife or servants to read? You sit with that.
Rhianna Dhillon:
Was this in 1960?
Zainab Juma:
1960.
Rhianna Dhillon:
Unbelievable.
Zainab Juma:
Yeah, yeah. Richard Hoggart was, he wrote the uses of Literacy was one of the witnesses. And he sort of writes about and kind of gave commentary on the trial afterwards and described it as a moment where the sensibilities of the ruling classes really met an evolving permissive society. And the planned defence was around literary merit. This was something worth publishing because it had a literary merit, something that you've talked about in terms of people judging your work based on its sales and the rest of it. But in that moment when the lawyer for the prosecution said that the entire defence strategy changed to actually, who has a right to read. And that was quite for everyone, not just for Penguin, kind of quite a fortuitous little twist in the case because when the jury returned and a not guilty verdict, it sort of rendered that law useless. And without the trial of Lady Chatterley, you don't have Lace in 1988 and you don't have 50 shades of grey more recently, none of that happens. The book itself is not controversial, frankly, I think by modern standards it's quite gentle really. But we're not going to worry about it too much. Everyone's got their own view on it. But I suppose the controversy was outside of Penguin, it was other people's belief that they get to decide who is allowed to read things, and then we broke it.
Kate Mosse:
And also I would say again, a very, very important moment and really worth remembering now, that our job as writers, as people who get work out there, is to be courageous. And we are living in these times now. We have to step up and protect free speech, protect the idea from some people who believe that they have the right to define what everybody else does. And it's that courage of it, as you say, this is a deliberate thing. There are publishers all over the world saying, we are going to publish this even though you're going to slap us in injunction on it. And we've got to be as bold as Alan Lane was. We really have to be.
Zainab Juma:
I mean, look what's happened in the last two weeks in Russia, right? A publisher has had to self censor send staff into hiding and take their own books out of publication in order to avoid prosecution. And I cannot imagine what the decision Alan Lane might have made would've been in a more repressive circumstance.
Kate Mosse:
It is about courage.
Zainab Juma:
And also on the flip side, what an epic act of trolling. It's brilliant, really like to push people's buttons.
Rhianna Dhillon:
We have obviously talked a lot about Alan Lane. Zainab, have you got any great anecdotes about Alan Lane?
Zainab Juma:
I mean there's tons. I have got two favourites. One is just simply from a photo in our archive. He was a brand man. He really understood brand and marketing.
Rhianna Dhillon:
This is why you like him so much.
Zainab Juma:
I mean, yeah, but to an extent where even I don't go that far. There is a picture of him and his wife Letitia leaving the church after their wedding and they leave to a guard of honour of cardboard cutouts of penguins, which it's simply too much. it's far too much. The other thing that I really love, just he's complicated character like any other, but the thing I would define him as is just epically a hustler. And when Penguin got too big for the crypt under a church in Marylebone -- it was initially a warehouse and operations room, and also operating out of the Bodley Head. They bought a bit of farm out near what was to become Heathrow airport in a place called Harmondsworth near Oxbridge. And the farm was still active, so it with 200 pounds worth of cabbage. So before he could really do anything, he had to first sell the cabbage. It's glorious. Very definition of an entrepreneur, isn't it?
Rhianna Dhillon:
Love that. Okay, so earlier we referred to Penguin's mission, which was obviously to make books for everyone. And of course there is a big drive now, especially to make books accessible to all, which is obviously inspired by Alan Lane's original vision. So Zainab, tell us about some of the ways that you are doing this today, apart from the ones that might go a little bit more under the radar, the ones that are maybe less Instagramable but actually are really making a difference.
Zainab Juma:
Yeah, there's two that I am particularly fond of that are a bit more recent. One was founded alongside the National Literacy Trust, and it's a programme called Libraries for Primaries, which I think you've discussed on the podcast before. So there is no legal obligation to have a library in a primary school, which is wild. And of course where there's no legal obligation, there's also no allocation of funding. So at the time that the programme was launched, one in seven primary schools did not have a library. And that rose to one in four in the most deprived areas, which is terrible. But in the last four years, Penguin together with the National Literacy Trust kind of put together this incredible coalition of different organisations, charities, companies, the rest. And this May, actually in 2025, saw the 1500th libraries for primaries library installed and that's amazing. Early intervention is so important. If you are not read to at home, if you don't own a book, if you do not get to choose to read, it's not just the obligation to read. It's getting to go and make that a part of how you form your identity in the way that you spend your time.
And it has such a knock on effect on how you grow up and your measures for success and everything. So that's incredible. The other one's really, really close to me as well. So I have a member of my family who started to lose their eyesight in their teens, sort of the macular degeneration that hit you usually when you're older. Hit her when she was about 13, 14. And in 2022, I think we entered into big partnership with the RNIB. And all of our audio books are now available for free to any RNIB member and the RNAB are also free to create braille or large print editions of any penguin book. The licence is just sort of there. And that's amazing too. So the spirit of it is not just that everyone should have access to books, which is incredibly important, but also that everyone has the opportunity to be a reader as long as the obstacles aren't thrown up. And that's what it's about. It's about knocking those obstacles down and building the bridges that you need to surmount whatever it is that you to surmount. Those are my two favourites. There are so many.
Rhianna Dhillon:
That’s brilliant. Kate, what about you? Is there anything that you've sort of come across that you feel like is really doing a lot of the work at the moment?
Kate Mosse:
What's really interesting listening to Zainab is that there has been this enormous shift. The libraries act of, I think 64, isn't it? That enshrined obviously after the second World War. But then at that moment, the idea that every young person, wherever they came from -- the library on a high street in particular, is the one free democratic space. It's one place, you don't have to spend money, everybody is allowed in, believing in equality and fairness. And of course what has happened is since then there has been a rolling back of that, that everything has been, if you pay, you can go in here, all of this kind of stuff. And the loss of primary school libraries and indeed secondary school libraries is part of the same thing. The myth that technology has made that all obsolete.
The idea that every single person can get everything they want, but what about if you don't have a computer in the house or you've got one? And we saw this during COVID, the inequalities that came out of that. So I think that what is great is seeing publishers obviously like Penguin, but other publishers too, are stepping into what before would've been the social and political space
To provide things that we know that every young person deserves. And if the state's not going to do it, it's up to all of us to do it instead. Our very first project for the Women's Prize right at the beginning was a project called Focus on Fiction. And it's particularly painful in a way to have seen recent conversations about how few, particularly boys, are reading, and the decline in all of that. And it was a project for teachers of key stage three to keep boys reading at the moment that boys reading for pleasure drops off and we provided classroom materials for those teachers in that particular academic bracket that would be books that boys might engage with. And I just kind of love that that was the first literacy education project that Women's Prize did. It was for boys. Because every reader matters. And so I think it's great. This is what I think what publishing is great at, actually. Going, okay, there's a gap there. We're going to fill it.
Rhianna Dhillon:
Yeah. So what about the next 30 years? You've just had your 30th anniversary. You can never rest.
Kate Mosse:
I'm hobbling around in my nineties.
Rhianna Dhillon:
But what do you hope for the future of the Women's Prize? What changes would you like to see? What gaps would you like to see filled in the future?
Kate Mosse:
I am thrilled that we have finally the Women's Prize for nonfiction. I think it's incredibly important. There are still enormous discrepancies in the way that a narrative nonfiction by women and narrative nonfiction by men are treated. So only 25% of reviews of nonfiction books are by women. And when you take out menopause, childcare and cookery it's almost nothing. There are huge discrepancies in the money given what we call an advance to male authors versus female authors in this space as well. And one of the reasons that I was delighted when I went to the board and I said, we've got to do this now. We haven't got any money, but we've got to just say we're doing it and the money will come. And it did, although anybody with peep pockets who's listening we'd love some more than what went in. There was this moment when we were about to have a new unelected prime minister of the country in that there was this battle between Rishi Sunak, a man, Liz Truss, a woman, and one of the reputable leading newspapers ran a reading list for both of the potential new unelected prime ministers. There wasn’t a single book by a woman on it.
Rhianna Dhillon:
Wait, what do you mean?
Kate Mosse:
10 books, if you get into Downing Street, these are the books you must read, not a single book by a woman on either list. And bear in mind, one was a woman, one of the candidates.
And so I said, we've got to do this now. So if you like the idea that when you want to know something, you want the person who knows that might be a woman, it might be a person who defines differently, it might be a man. But the point is that there is still the idea that an expert is a man with a beard and not a woman, even though. So we felt this was the moment and I'm really proud that we managed to get that off the ground. I think it matters. I've always, back to my first falling in love with penguin classics, I've always wanted to do a translated fiction prize, but we've tried and tried and it's very hard to do. For all the obvious reasons you can imagine it's very expensive, it's all of that kind of thing. But I suppose more than anything is the Women's Prize is not the story of one person, one winner, one shortlist, one project. It's everybody. Everybody who is a reader or a writer or a librarian, a bookseller, publisher, celebrating exceptional writing by women, and long may that last, when I'm absolutely, I hope I will not be in the ground in 30 years time. I come from long living women in the Mosse family, but I would so love to not be the person talking about it by then. I feel like I should be drinking a gin and tonic on a terrace somewhere.
Rhianna Dhillon:
Saying look at my legacy.
Kate Mosse:
Yeah, yeah. That's the point about activism of all kinds. It's not about one person, it's about everybody who makes something happen. Honouring all of those people and the people who will come and change it, the next generation of women will do it differently and that's their right to do it. So I can't imagine what they will do, but I will be cheering them on from the sidelines.
Rhianna Dhillon:
And Zainab the next 90 years of…
Zainab Juma:
Oh, I get 90 and Kate gets 30. This is unacceptable.
Kate Mosse:
You're a lot younger than me. I think that's the point about this.
Zainab Juma:
I've got to imagine some kind of sci-fi future. This is terrible.
Rhianna Dhillon:
But yeah. What kind of changes do you think that Penguin is going to make in publishing in the next 90 years?
Zainab Juma:
I think, and I put this out to my team, I was like, this is a very difficult question. I think we're just going to be looking at more and more interesting and diverse ways to read. You just have a look at the explosion of audio in the last few years and its continuing growth. I thinking about things like fan fiction and hybrid genres and all of that stuff. I think we're ever expanding the idea of what it means to read and to be a reader. And that's what I want to see. I would love to see, for example, I don't know, TV series and books that are so integrated that you can't enjoy the whole thing without doing both or interesting audio serialisation. I think also literacy rates not everywhere, but in a lot of places they've fallen. But we're also, I think in an age of overwhelm where books are one of the few media where if you're reading the words as opposed to listening, that's the only thing you can do. And that's quite a rare activity to be able to engage in nowadays. And I hope that we're going to see a retreat into the relief of books and into really spending time with the topic. I know my attention span has gone to absolute hell, but when I spend time reading, I feel calm. I've read books I've physically thrown against a wall. They made me so angry. But they were still saying to me…
Rhianna Dhillon:
Knowing you, that does not surprise me
Zainab Juma:
Thank you so much.
Kate Mosse:
Did you know the Queen's Reading Room commissioned research recently, and they proved within this very large medical trial that when people read, it changes the brain. But reading, exactly that thing, because specifically reading, reading is not passive. Almost every other form of entertainment now is semi passive and possibly completely passive. Whereas reading it is always a contract between the text and the person. And I remember in publishing when everybody said, oh, books are dead when eBooks were coming in, and of course what we saw was different sort of thing. The beauty of the object, people still want the fact that we can pick up a book and give it to somebody else. All of these kind of things. So it adapts, but in the end it's always about one story and one set of hands.
Zainab Juma:
Yeah, I think that's remarkable about reading uniquely amongst all of the ways that you could possibly spend your time and entertain yourself is it is one of the only things I think that is in itself an act of creation. Every reading experience is so utterly unique, the way that you picture characters, the way that you understand the cadence of a story. And we all sort of occupy quite a creative space as children. And then as you grow up, you maybe have less time and your time changes and your brain changes. And it's the one bit left where you just pick up a book and you delve in and you get to make something in that moment. And I hope that that's just what people are going to remember. And I mean reading is as vibrant as ever, but I'd love to see more and more people discovering that. Pick up an Penguin.
Rhianna Dhillon:
And finally, we can't let either of you go without one book recommendation. It's what we do here at the Penguin podcast. It's going to be the hardest question of all. But across Penguins, 90 years of publishing, which book would you recommend that our listeners read? Any other, Kate, I'm so tentative asking this question because it's so hard. It's mean and horrible.
Kate Mosse:
I can only say that the book that has been most significant for me, both as a reader and as a person growing up in the world and then as a writer, is Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte. And what I have learned over my years is that almost no men I've ever met have read it.
Rhianna Dhillon:
You're kidding.
Kate Mosse:
Unless it's a set text, because it was always very much missold that this is a love story. It's like, no, it isn't, mate. This is a lot of the problems of the world lie in this. But it's a book that changed what it was possible for women to write. It's ambitious, it's baggy, it's inspirational. It has never been out of print.
Rhianna Dhillon:
And I think we've got a copy on the table here.
Kate Mosse:
I am going to try and steal that as I leave. I have not gotten an original. I’ve been eyeing it. So I would say Weathering Heights, Emily Bronte's only novel published the year before she died.
Rhianna Dhillon:
Oh, wonderful. That's a really, really great one.
Zainab Juma:
I'm going to go almost back to the beginning of Penguin. So two years into Penguin's inception, a series came out that ran for many decades called The Penguin Specials. And they were always about, they always published very fast after being written. There was sort of almost the book form of long form journalism and they helped to inform people about rising fascism in Europe at the time and then onwards into economic theory and the rest of it and what was really going on. And one of the first penguin specials was HG Wells, The Rights of Man. And it is still so important and so pertinent today. And then I was sitting there thinking, ah, I've picked a book by a man and I'm here with Kate Mosse, but we also publish a new Penguin Specials edition of The Rights of Man With a foward by Ali Smith, who is just the most perfect, one of the most, I think, astute commentators on how humans navigate the world today in both a really macro and micro way. So that edition specifically is really worth a read because she, the H.G. Wells text is there, but Ali Smith really grounds it in where we are today.
Kate Mosse:
Go and order a copy instantly.
Rhianna Dhillon:
We all shall. Thank you so much, Kate and Zainab for joining us on the Penguin Podcast. What a joy it has been to celebrate 90 years of Penguin with both of you. As ever, the Penguin website is an absolute treasure trove of information. So if you want to find more details on some of the highlights of Penguin's history or any of the books or authors that we've mentioned today, just click the link in the show notes. You can also find all sorts of author interviews and book recommendations in our previous podcast episodes. Penguin has been such a constant in my reading life, and it's amazing to think about what it's grown into and the impact that it's had on millions of readers and authors across the decades. Whatever you are looking for, you can find it with Penguin. And if you can't find it yourself, you can always ask Penguin. We are busy collecting your Ask Penguin questions for some new episodes in the autumn. So if you've got something you want to know or challenge the team to try and find out, please keep submitting to us via the email address Penguin podcast@penguinrandomhouse.co.uk, or on the dedicated podcast broadcast channel, which you can find on our Instagram page at penguin uk. Books huge. Thanks to my guests, Zainab Jimma and Kate Moss. We'll be back with more episodes and more recommendations soon. Subscribe so you don't miss a thing. And thank you so much for listening.