A Penguin deck chair, available at the company's website, which you'll have to find for yourself

“What’s the most depressing piece of Penguin merchandising?” asks Anthony Cummins. “Notebooks featuring the classic covers of much-loved titles that cost more than the novels themselves.” As Cummins notes, “the publisher Allen Lane set up Penguin to try to increase the numbers of people able to afford good books,” Cummins observes. “In paperback editions priced 6d (two and a half pence) –- ’same as a packet of cigarettes’ -– he reprinted quality fiction and non-fiction and ensured their availability not only at bookseller s but also at railway stations and tobacconists.”

But now, Cummins writes in a withering commentary at The Guardian, “the cover of Penguin’s 1960 edition of Lady Chatterley’s Lover –- considered by many to be a symbol of deep cultural change –- adorns the side of a mug that ‘will brighten up even the most tired kitchen shelf.’”

Cummins lets the designer of those mugs, Tony Davis, explain it: “”I’ve always felt there was a natural affinity between books and coffee or tea-drinking which wasn’t reflected in the objects we drink out of. It seemed natural to put them together. Luckily, Penguin Books Ltd had the vision to see the potential of this synthesis.”

To which Cummins replies: “Lane probably thought he had vision, too. Apparently the deck chairs are just the thing for ‘lazy summer days in the garden … sipping Pimms and listening to cricket’ – accompanied, perhaps, by the sound of a once-radical publisher flogging its illustrious history.”