A diet of Penguins

At the Telegraph, Toby Clements has a delightful piece on Allen Lane and the history of Penguin Books. It is all worth reading, but here's a snippet I especially liked:

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.