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This piece was originally published on February 19 2009. It has been republished to mark the 80th anniversary of Penguin Books.

In 1960, 25 years after he had founded Penguin books and revolutionised publishing with the introduction of cheap, well-designed and good-quality paperbacks, the publisher Allen Lane donated his collection of early editions to the University of Bristol. Most of them were signed by their authors, and one or two – such as Robert Graves’s Selected Poems, in which the poet wrote a delightful little stanza about the diet of penguins – were inscribed to him with a personal note. This collection formed the nucleus of what has become known as the Penguin Archive, which has since expanded to include every book to roll off the Penguin presses (it still grows by a metre of shelf space a month) as well as 2,300 boxes of private letters, notes, design briefs and reviews, all relating to the editorial development of the company through the last century.

If Penguin were an ordinary publishing company the archive might be merely interesting, but the Arts and Humanities Research Council has just granted a team from Bristol University £650,000 to start a four-year project digging through the archive. Under Allen Lane, Penguin played a broader and more overtly political and cultural role in our society, and it has become intricately involved in the way we see Britain in the 20th century. Dr John Lyon, who is leading the project, describes Penguin as the most distinctive and perhaps the most important publisher of the last century, and says that this archive is a record of the “democratisation of reading”.

Although Allen Lane gathered a talented team around him – mostly maverick autodidacts who met for planning dinners that lasted long into the night in a Spanish restaurant in Soho – in many ways the company’s achievement comes down to him. Instead of going to university, he joined his uncle at the publisher Bodley Head in London, and perhaps this truncated education – unusual among gentleman publishers of the day – made him impatient with the staid world of pre-war publishing. He was certainly attracted to publishing’s riskier ventures.

He was the first to publish James Joyce’s Ulysses in Britain, but his master stroke was to perfect the mass-market paperback by combining the broad appeal of the down-market American “penny dreadful” with the chic design of the Albatross imprint from Germany. He is supposed to have come up with this last idea while waiting for a train at Exeter station on his way back from a weekend spent with Agatha Christie, but this may be fanciful.

Whatever the impulse, in 1935 he published the first 10 Penguins, and all are gathered in the archive, along with extensive notes on their jacket design and typography, and a sheet of colour swatches the designers decided on to differentiate between biographies and fiction and so on. There is also a blocked out hand-coloured version of the iconic cover, designed by Edward Young (while still only 21), which looks like the jacket of a book called The Main Title by ?The Authors Name. There is a sense of excitement about all this. You can almost feel the inventive energy as the young company began to organise itself to revolutionise publishing.

Alongside the images are letters in reaction to the publication of these first Penguin books, saved in a scrap book, from writers such as JB Priestley, who described Lane’s trick as a “great publishing feat”. George Orwell, who later signed his own books in the series “Geo” Orwell, wrote in the New English Weekly that the first 10 Penguins were “splendid value for sixpence each”, but he was less impressed with Penguin’s second tranche of books, although they remained on his mantelpiece “as inoffensive to the eye as any sixpenny books could be”.

Orwell only had at most 20 Penguin books on his shelf, but seeing them gathered en masse in the archive is a sobering sight. There are more than 500 metres of them, stretching from the first one, a translation of André Maurois’s Ariel (the writer who also wrote Fattypuffs and Thinifers), to those published last year (a Jamie Oliver title, for example), and it is extraordinary how even just a glance at the books’ spines gives you an idea of the development of thought and fashion in this country through the past century.

The first 10 titles include Hemingway and Agatha Christie, but as Europe became a more serious place in the run-up to the Second World War, the titles became more bracing. This was when the Penguin Specials were published, slim volumes that contained grim warnings of what was to come: Searchlight on Spain, Germany Turns the Clock Back, The Jewish Problem, Keeping Rabbits and Poultry on Scraps. The line-up of these books alone, all cheaply printed, and some bound with staples rather than stitching, is a perfect record of how we thought before, during and after the war. The Specials petered out during the Seventies, but Graham Bannock’s How to Survive the Slump (1975) is among the many that are worth revisiting.

It is nice to see how the penguin that adorns the books’ spines has changed his shape through time – he shrinks, he gets fat, he gets punched in the tummy, he looks left, he looks right. But there is more to the archive than jacket design details and editorial notes. It was under Allen Lane that Penguin published DH Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, until then banned in the United Kingdom. The archive contains all the legal papers from the trial, including the court summons and a wonderful telegram informing Lane: “legal action imminet (sic) stop advise immediate return = bill and hans =”.

Penguin’s lawyer Michael Rubinstein wrote more than 300 letters to the great and the good of the day whom he hoped might give expert advice for the defence. Cecil Day-Lewis and TS Eliot are among those who agreed to do so, and those letters are kept here, but the finest answer comes from Enid Blyton who regrets that she cannot possibly testify because her husband will not allow it. She goes on to hope that Rubinstein will not let Penguin think that she is “too unco-operative for words”.

These glimpses of the personality behind the name are fascinating for the casual browser and there are some lovely letters revealing hitherto unguessed at vanities, peccadilloes and predilections. Graham Greene refuses a biographical note because he finds them “horribly chatty”, while Vita Sackville-West writes from Sissinghurst in 1942 that she objects most strongly to being described as “the wife of a diplomat” because it evokes “a dreadful type of person”.

John Betjeman is friendlier and draws a little penguin on the letter to accompany his study of John Piper, but Elizabeth David is furious with the 1962 redesign of the jacket of her A Book of Mediterranean Food, which really does look like a dog’s dinner. Most charming of all, though, is the correspondence with John Wyndham in which Eunice Frost, an editor at Penguin, asks what a triffid looks like. His drawing in reply is a sweet little thing, almost bereft of any threat other than maybe the chance of giving one a slight rash. It shows perhaps that a picture sometimes is worth a great deal less than a thousand words.

There are plenty more boxes to be opened – some of them fruit boxes – and each one will yield its treasures and its disappointments. The researchers at Bristol University are planning to put the whole thing online, so that the general public can browse through it, and they are organising several events to celebrate the fact that in 2010 Penguin will be 75 years-old, including Penguin Days, which aim to recruit as many different Penguin stories from the general public.

If you cannot wait until then, www.bristol.ac.uk/penguinarchiveproject has links to all manner of other Penguin websites.

You cannot help but think that Allen Lane would approve of this democratisation of the archive.