One of the best publishing stories of all time concerns Alfred A. Knopf, who had published a book about penguins he was particularly proud of, and sent a copy as a birthday present to the young daughter of a friend. He got back a neatly written thank you letter from the girl that read: “Dear Mr. Knopf, Thank you very much for the lovely book. It told me more about penguins than I wanted to know.”

I confess that when I picked up Jeremy Lewis’s biography of Allen Lane (Viking, 416 pages, $30), the founder of Penguin Books, the same thought crossed my mind, and indeed, after reading all 416 pages of it, I was on the same side as the little girl in the story.

This is not necessarily Mr. Lewis’s fault. When I came to work at Simon & Schuster in 1958, Robert Gottlieb, then (pre-“Catch-22”) a brilliant young editor and the house enfant terrible, told me, along with much other good advice, that books about the book publishing business never sell – his generic title for the whole genre was “Drops From a Publisher’s Inkwell.” Having since then written two of them myself, I can attest that Bob was, as usual, 100% right.

Looking on the brighter side of things, there are at least two potentially interesting books lurking in these pages, one of them a social history of Penguin books as a cultural phenomenon, the other a gossipy story about Allen Lane and the people around him over the four decades during which he was a major figure in London book publishing (and a rather more tentative one in New York) who transformed Penguin Books into a large and profitable international company.

Back then, doing the annual “London trip” was a major ambition and/or perk of American publishers and editors. (Now, of course, British and American publishing houses are all owned by a few major conglomerates, their identities merely consist of a different letterheads, if they’re lucky, and New York has long since replaced London as the center of English-language publishing.) At the time, Allen Lane’s name was one to conjure with, though he had become more of a business tycoon and figurehead, and a rather remote one at that, so it was his editors one called on to find out what was going on at Penguin Books, and not “Sir Allen” himself, as he became when he was knighted in 1952.

In any event, as Jeremy Lewis makes clear,”AL,”as his employees referred to him, like most good publishers, was not a reading man. Although “descended from a long line of farming folk,” in the West Country, AL drifted into the publishing business in the wake of his uncle John, a bookseller who became co-founder of the well-known English publishing house the Bodley Head. AL started work there “behind the counter,” as the phrase then went, as “office boy and general dogsbody” at age 16,after graduating from Bristol Grammar School. As Lewis notes, he at once developed “a shrewd sense of which books would, or would not, suit particular shops or buyers,” without reading more than a page or two of them – a skill that still today separates the publisher from the editor. Very soon the boy was dealing with printers, booksellers, and book designers,learning the “nuts and bolts” of book publishing, which is to say the fundamentals of a trade – or “the book trade,” as it is still called in Britain.

It should be noted that while uncle and nephew were both socially ambitious, AL was “a grammar school boy” (i.e., he did not attend a “public school” like Eton, Harrow, or Rugby) and did not go to a university. This was to stand him in good stead,first of all because he had a fund of robust and acute business and common sense to draw on, which never deserted him, and second because he understood that there was an enormous thirst for knowledge in the rapidly growing middle class of the United Kingdom.

The cultural history of Penguin Books is perhaps the most interesting part of Mr. Lewis’s book, because, as he correctly sees it, Penguin became, almost from the very beginning, one of the major (and most visible) of the phenomena that formed a new, and more aggressive, middle-class intellectual and political elite. The British Broadcasting Corporation, with its earnest, not-for-profit dedication to culture for the masses, and the extremely profitable Penguin Books, with its equal determination to bring the sum total of human knowledge, literature, history, and science to readers in an elegantly designed, readable, and instantly recognizable package for a shilling a book, were both part and parcel of the sweeping social changes that would bring the Labour Party to power in 1945, and still to this day form the British social and political consensus, despite the occasional retrograde step like the Thatcher years. Still, even Baroness Thatcher herself is a product of that same middle-class, non-conformist, well-educated, meritocratic world from which AL, and many of the people who worked for him or who wrote for his list, came – the world of H.G. Wells, John Betjeman, and George Bernard Shaw, rather than that of Nancy Mitford, Evelyn Waugh, and Cyril Connolly. AL, though he became a millionaire, was by instinct not a Tory.

Whatever else AL did, he changed the way England (and much of the rest of the non-American English-speaking world) bought books, as well as what they expected to get out of them. He had a shrewd eye for quality, he loved a good fight and had the courage to publish controversial works,from “Ulysses” to the unexpurgated edition of “Lady Chatterley’s Lover,” and he had a taste for ambitious projects like Nikolaus Pevsner’s “An Outline of European Architecture” or the Pelican “History of Art.” (Penguins eventually morphed into Pelicans, illustrated nonfiction books, and Puffins, books for children.) The Penguin book, together with its offshoots,became an indispensable part of British culture, and spread throughout the British Empire and Commonwealth, where it came to define a certain kind of culture.

The story of how AL created this mini-empire within the Empire, of how he managed to dominate it as long as he lived, and of how it eventually lost its way, eventually becoming, after his death, just a piece of another transatlantic publishing conglomerate, is by far the most interesting part of Lewis’s book. Reading “Penguin Special” makes one realize how much was lost when the owners of distinctive and independent publishing houses, most of which had special traditions and ambience, sold their companies, so that today the lion’s share of book publishing in the English-speaking world is owned by three or four major conglomerates. Thanks to AL, a Penguin book could never be confused with anything else – no “bodice-rippers,” no trash, no cheap paper with ink that comes off on your hands. It stood for serious culture and delivered value for the money in a way that few other publishing enterprises have succeeded in doing.

AL’s rise to fame, fortune, and a knighthood is well told here, along with the lifelong sibling rivalry, the need to play one Penguin “executive”(the word itself is unpenguinesque) off against another. Mr. Lewis does all this as well as it can be done. He is very good at the “us against them” ambience at the heart of any successful publishing operation in its prime, be it Penguin or Simon & Schuster, and better still at the rise of two famous penguins – the late Tony Godwin,who went from being AL’s protege to quarreling bitterly with him over a book of cartoons he published, and from there to a brief,but glamorous transatlantic hardcover career, and Tom Maschler, who went from Penguin to Cape, where he seemed to many to be emulating the career of Bob Gottlieb on the other side of the Atlantic. For those who care about British book publishing, there is plenty here to make them happy, and Mr. Lewis has packed enough gossip into the book to keep many of those who attend the Frankfurt Book Fair reading for many nights.

Still, Penguin Books in its heyday doesn’t turn out to have been very different from, say, Random House, if you replace Allen Lane with Bennett Cerf, and Penguin Books with the Modern Library. There were office affairs, rivalries, the rise and fall of enfants terribles, hard drinking at sales conferences, temperamental art directors, egomaniacal authors, women executives with a crush on the boss. I’m still enough of a book publisher myself, after nearly 50 years in the business to ask: Who will read this? Not that it isn’t well written and well researched – it is – and not that I didn’t enjoy reading it, because I did, but still. … Allen Lane, who remembers?

Penguin was a great idea for its time, but the Internet, Google, “on-demand” publishing, and Amazon.com have put everything AL wanted to put between soft covers at everybody’s instant electronic command. Like all successful innovators, had he lived to see the future, AL wouldn’t have liked it at all. Which has always been the way of innovators in book publishing since the time of Gutenberg.

Mr. Korda is editor in chief emeritus of Simon & Schuster, where he worked as an editor for 47 years, and author of many books, including “Charmed Lives,” “Another Life,” “Queenie,” and “Horse People.”