Margen
Allen Lane was heading home after a weekend at Agatha Christie's house when, at Exeter station, he looked for something to read on the journey. All he found were magazines and cheap reprints of creaky Victorian novels. Good books existed, but they were expensive, hardbound and confined to smart bookshops.
His idea was to treat the book as a consumer product: pocket-sized editions of quality authors — Hemingway and Christie herself among the first ten titles — for sixpence, the price of a pack of cigarettes at the time. He would sell them in stations and department stores, not just bookshops.
Thus Penguin was born in 1935. The trade predicted ruin; around three million paperbacks sold in the first year.
Mass reading wasn't born in a library. It was born on a station platform.