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Actor David Morrissey famously played Gordon Brown in the Channel 4 drama 'The Deal'. More recent work includes Nowhere Boy (about the early life of John Lennon), Is Anybody There? (with Michael Caine), and The Other Boleyn Girl (starring Scarlett Johansson). David's object is the paperback novel, an idea that revolutionised reading from the 1930s onwards.

The man behind the paperback (and Penguin books) was Allen Lane. Having spent a weekend visiting Agatha Christie, Lane was waiting at Exeter train station. Dismayed at the lack of reading options, he came up with the idea of the paperback.

And it was a secretary in his office who suggested a penguin as the symbol to represent the new business. Consequently, Lane dispatched an employee to sketch the animal which now represents Penguin Books.

The first of these books were published in summer 1935, featuring authors such as Ernest Hemingway and Agatha Christie.

Some of the paperbacks owned by David Morrissey are pictured above, including one of those classic early Penguin designs on the cover of The Hound of the Baskervilles.