Birds in the hand
Nicolas Barker
THE LIFE AND TIMES OF ALLEN LANE by Jeremy Lewis Penguin/Viking, £25, pp. 484, ISBN 0670914851 PENGUIN BY DESIGN by Phil Baines Penguin/Allen Lane, £16.99, pp. 255, ISBN 0713998393 V £14.99 (plus £2.25 p&p) 0870 800 4848 Publishers do not make popular heroes. Who has heard of Humphrey Moseley, who published the Caroline poets? Or Jacob Tonson, apart from Pope’s patronising verses? Thomas Hughes made Tom Brown’s School Days famous, but could not do the same for Daniel Macmillan. But if there is an exception to the rule, it must be Allen Lane, founder of Penguin Books in 1935. The date, the format and the name have all become famous enough to put Lane in the national pantheon. But few know more than that, so a full-length biography is welcome. It is not the first: important Penguin anniversaries from 1960 onwards were celebrated with a history that contained a short life of the founder, and two longserving henchmen — Sir William Emrys Williams and Jack Morpurgo — have both written about him. But in all these he was an icon, the man who invented Penguins. This is the first attempt to get at the man, a slippery, elusive character whom Lewis has done well to pin down. It is his ‘life and times’, not a history of Penguin Books, which may one day be written, and all the better for this portrait.
He was not even called Lane, but his childless uncle, John Lane of the Bodley Head, visiting his West Country relations in Bristol, took a fancy to them, and offered Allen a job, provided that he changed his name; his younger brothers, Richard and John, followed suit. John Lane has had a rather bad press, mainly for not standing up for Oscar Wilde and Aubrey Beardsley (both unwillingly inherited from Leonard Smithers), but he was a capable as well as original publisher. Allen quickly picked up the trade, and would reminisce in later life about days spent packing books and calling on booksellers for orders. All too soon his uncle died in 1925, and the day-to-day running of the business descended to Allen and his brothers. All might have gone well if it had not been for a farcical libel suit, which took an unconscionable amount of time and money to settle and almost brought the Bodley Head down. John Lane’s American widow stood firm throughout this trying episode; her courage and support were vital to the brothers, and when she died she left her nephews and niece, Nora, money as well as the firm. By now, however, Allen had a new idea, and shed the Bodley Head and its one main asset, Ulysses, without much regret.
There was nothing essentially new about the paperback as such. Indeed, while still printed by hand, all books had been issued stitched in paper wrappers; the buyer then had them bound, again by hand. The industrial revolution mechanised paper-making and printing, and publishers began to issue books in cloth boards, the first hardbacks. But Murray’s ‘Home and Colonial’ series in the 1840s had paper covers (easily portable for the traveller), and the idea of a ‘classics’ series, born a little later, matured into The World’s Classics and Everyman series at the turn of the century. Thomas Nelson’s ‘Sevenpenny Classics’, bound in imitation cloth, were as cheap as they got, and even fewer pence would buy The Rights of Man or The Three Musketeers in paper covers. But the real ancestor of the Penguin was the Tauchnitz series of English classics, founded in Leipzig in 1837 and on sale only abroad (under the terms agreed with the English publishers). Still, most English homes had a Tauchnitz paperback or two on their shelves. In decline since the first world war, the series had been first rivalled and then taken over by an extraordinary literary entrepreneur, John Holroyd-Reece (né Hermann Riess), who flashed briefly across the publishing scene and as quickly burned out. His rival series was called Albatross Books; designed by Hans Mardersteig, it offered contemporary classics in an attractive new form.
With the worst of the Depression over and the second world war not yet imminent, this cosmopolitan model struck Lane as full of promise. The only problem, a large one, was how to put it across to a deeply conservative British book trade. Publishers might let their books come out in paperback abroad, but would only see it as competition if the same were available at home; booksellers were as little inclined to give valuable space to books in bulk at cut prices. But the gamble paid off, due to not one but several strokes of good luck. First came the name. The brothers were audibly discussing other birds besides the albatross, when a secretary on the other side of the partition said, ‘What about penguin?’ The name stuck; Teddy Young drew the first Penguin, which with ‘6d net’ to left and right and ‘Complete and unabridged’ below became the series trademark.
Next came the books: Ariel, A Farewell to Arms, Poet’s Pub, Gone to Earth and the first two crime novels, The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club and The Mysterious Affair at Styles. Some came from the Bodley Head, some from friends (Sayers and Christie); only one publisher took the risk (and Lane’s advance), Jonathan Cape; afterwards he said, ‘I thought you were bound to go bust and I thought I’d take 400 quid off you before you did.’ Printers, notably Richard Clay, were kinder, offering long credit.
Then came the first big order. Lane rightly saw that to reach the general public he must go over the heads of the trade. Accordingly, he went to see Woolworth’s buyer, who had no intention of buying any. But his wife was there and exclaimed over them; on impulse, her husband changed his mind and bought 64,000 copies in all. W. H. Smith followed Woolworth, and the rest of the trade came round.
The last stroke of luck was, paradoxically, the war. Paper-rationing was calculated on stocks held prewar; Penguin had had a lot then, and was never as starved as its competitors. War also increased demand for cheap, pocketable books. Non-fiction Pelicans had quickly followed in 1937, encouraging a wider readership to think for itself. Puffins (1940) brought up a new generation of children familiar with paperbacks even before they could read. War exiles made their mark too. Teddy Young joined the navy (his One of Our Submarines later became Penguin 1000), and his place was taken by Jan Tschichold, whose conversion from Bauhaus modernism to classic typography made Penguins the best-designed as well as cheapest books in Britain.
King Penguins, the prettiest series of all, was patently modelled on the German Insel Verlag picture books. Nikolaus Pevsner began The Buildings of Britain, and with it a lifelong love of his adopted country (his son became a director of Penguin). Other series followed, notably the ‘Penguin Classics’ that began with E. V. Rieu’s Odyssey in 1946. Penguins, always distinctive, became more various. Hans Schmoller improved on Tschichold’s work, and then came the revolution that put pictures on the covers, the first by Abram Games, then Germano Facetti. Phil Baines sees this as the forerunner of the ‘design’ revolution; his own cover — Penguin spines on the front, browning fore-edges on the back — is typical of the wit as well as elegance of Penguin design.
Previous panegyrists of Penguin have praised its innovations, its far-sighted editorial policy, linking its serious populism with the social revolution in and after 1945, and acclaiming the quality of its bookproduction. Lane enjoyed all this réclame, but did not take it very seriously himself. Penguin for him was a family business, shared originally with Richard and John (his brothers regarded his marriage as an inconvenience); John’s death in action brought a real partnership to an end, and the decline of his attachment to Richard makes tragic reading. Although he enjoyed the other figures in his life as advisers or drinking companions, he took all the big decisions — buying Harmondsworth, for years the Penguin base, printing the Shaw ‘Million’, publishing Lady Chatterley, finally retrieving the rights in Ulysses — himself.
Apart from Eunice Frost, reader and editor from early on, left behind but not forgotten in the expansion of the Fifties, he had no regular confidants. His letters to her form part of the Penguin archive at Bristol, which Jeremy Lewis has used to good effect. But he has also read what other people wrote, and interviewed as many of those who knew Lane as possible. As always there are discrepancies in different accounts, particularly between the old guard and the new in the uneasy period between the Chatterley trial in 1960 and the public flotation in 1968. Tony Godwin saw the future more clearly than Lane, and their falling out was another tragedy, one that brought Lane’s Penguin to an end just before he died in 1970, rich in Penguin shares, but alone.
I only met Lane once, in 1958. I had gone to the new Penguin London office straight from Vaughan Williams’s funeral, for which the composer had chosen all the music himself. Lane, a connoisseur of funerals, saw the service-sheet in my hand and fixed me with the penetrating stare that all who knew him recall. ‘Was it very grand?’ he asked. I tried to tell him. ‘Oh, I wish I’d been there,’ he said. His unaffected, almost childlike curiosity has always stayed in my mind; looking back, it seems part — along with taking large risks but nothing for granted, being alive to anything new but never accepting ‘accepted opinion’ — of what made him more than just a great publisher.
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