Styled in the publishing house's publicity as a "gateway to the wealth of the Penguin list" the Pocket Penguin series was apparently designed as a testament to "the breadth, diversity and quality" of work published since 1935. Marketing director Joanna Prior said Penguin had "not wanted to look at quotas" when drawing up the list.
"Both Baldwin and Achebe, who I concede some people might feel were left out, in fact sell very little in this country. We were looking at our foremost writers and with 5,000 authors in print it was always going to be difficult," she said.
"We are not making any large claims for this list. We just wanted to celebrate and to show something of our range. We also wanted work that would suit a shorter format.
"We had to make some hard decisions, but I have to say Baldwin and Achebe were not hard decisions because they were not anywhere near our top 1,000 sellers."
Penguin was founded in 1935 by Allen Lane, then a publishing director at The Bodley Head. After visiting the author Agatha Christie in Devon, south-west England, he reputedly found himself with time to kill at Exeter railway station, where he could find only popular magazines or Victorian novels to read on his journey back to London.
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