Penguin's progress

0 Comments | Sunday Herald, The, May 22, 2005 | by Alan Taylor

PENGUIN SPECIAL: THE LIFE AND TIMES OF ALLEN LANE

BY JEREMY LEWIS

(VIKING, pounds-25)

GEORGE Orwell's attitude to Penguins was ambivalent. On the one hand they represented splendid value for sixpence. For five bob (25p in today's money), you could buy enough reading material to keep you going for months. The first batch of 10 Penguins, for example, catered for diverse tastes, from Dorothy L Sayers to Andr Maurois. Orwell, an omnivorous reader, would be the first to welcome that.

There was, however, a downside. With books so cheap, it was unlikely, surmised Orwell, that people would spend as much on them. Who would want to pay five shillings for 10 books, when you could have, say, three for a fraction of the price and spend the rest of your money on a movie or a pint of bitter? "For the publisher, the compositor, the author and the bookseller, " concluded Orwell, "it is a disaster." And to a certain extent he has been proved right. While the cheapness of books is a boon to readers, the rest of the book trade must struggle to make ends meet. It would be harsh to lay the blame for this at the door of Allen Lane, Penguin's begetter, and probably unjust. For as Jeremy Lewis recognises in this timely, engrossing and gossipy biography, published to coincide with Penguin's 70th anniversary, Penguin was as integral to British life in the 20th century as the BBC and the National Health Service. Without it, our cultural and intellectual impoverishment would be incalculable.

It is, of course, a familiar story. According to what Lewis describes as "the standard version of events", Allan Lane, then a tyro publisher, was returning to London after spending the weekend in Devon with Agatha Christie. Realising he had nothing to read, and appalled by the rubbish available at the railway station were he alive at this hour! he decided there and then to produce a line of paperbacks that would cost no more than a packet of cigarettes.

Initially, he faced hostility from publishers who were unwilling to allow him to publish their hardbacks in paperback. Nor were booksellers any more sympathetic. Many declined to give Penguins house room, complaining that the profit margin on books costing sixpence was too low and that such small books would be irresistible to shoplifters. Lane's choice of books was not well-received either. "Who's ever heard of Poet's Poob?" said one Manchester bookseller when shown a dummy of Eric Linklater's comic novel.

Sales were sluggish and Lane grew despondent. Legend has it that the turning point came three weeks before publication when he called at Woolworths head office. Its chief buyer was not impressed by the Penguins, finding the unillustrated, typographical covers in orange and white livery uninviting. His wife, however, was enthused, perhaps as much by Lane's charm as by his books. The buyer capitulated, Woolworths ordered Penguins in their tens of thousands, and the rest is publishing history. The first 10 Penguins were published on the Tuesday before the August Bank Holiday of 1935. In little more than a year Allan Lane had revolutionised publishing and inaugurated a brand that would become as familiar as Guinness and Rolls Royce.

For someone who had such a formative influence on the nation's reading habits, Lane was not a bookish person. Quite the contrary. His father "a connoisseur of cheddar cheese" was a surveyor who worked for Bristol Corporation. His mother, who came from farming stock, was the dominant parent. Lane was born in 1902 into circumstances familiar to devotees of George and Weedon Grossmith's novel The Diary Of A Nobody. His school record was "woefully undistinguished", a precious balm to those who believe that academic achievement is secondary to an experience of the real world. With university out of the question, Lane, aged 16, had little option but to accept an offer from his uncle John, owner of The Bodley Head, a small Londonbased publishing firm.

Lewis, who has himself worked in publishing much of his life, is familiar with the nuts and bolts of the quirky industry and fleshes out Lane's career with insider knowledge and contextual digressions. Thus, his biography is as much a history of the early 20th century book trade as it is a conventional life. Why Lane became such a great publisher is as hard to fathom as is why John Reith became such a formidable broadcaster or Harold Ross such an intuitive editor. What is clear is that publishing was his mtier. It suited his character and his lifestyle, combining glamour with hard graft. The best publishers thrive on instinct and imagination and impetuosity and intemperate enthusiasm. Their drug of choice is hype.

By all accounts, Lane was a mercurial figure, who inspired and gave loyalty but who could also sever a friendship as quickly as it was forged. His portfolio, however, was incomparable, ranging from Pevsner's Buildings of England to John Lehmann's Penguin New Writing. He went into the dock to champion Lady Chatterley's Lover and was the first British publisher of Ulysses.