However tenuous the connections between Uncle John and his nephew-cum-protégé, the two men were extraordinarily alike. No doubt Allen Lane modelled himself in many ways on his eminent kinsman, even if he never sported an Elizabethan-looking beard, and made a better job of eliminating his West Country accent; and although mass-produced paperbacks seem a far remove from the exquisite limited editions with which John Lane first made his reputation, The Bodley Head and the experiences Allen Lane underwent there haunted and defined his career as a publisher. Both men had come to London when little more than schoolboys; both were stocky, dapper men, impeccably turned out, with china-blue eyes which, in Allen Lane’s case, twinkled amiably enough for most of the time but, alarmingly, turned to chips of ice when unamused, whereas Uncle John’s were prone to weeping – which ‘mild affliction’, the playwright Ben Travers recalled, ‘lent kindliness to his expression’, even if ‘many of his authors must have accused him of shedding crocodile tears’. Both were impatient, bored by routine and the ‘sombre tyranny of the desk’, evasive, dilatory in replying to letters and liable to absent themselves at moments of crisis; both were unusually energetic, working all hours, seldom off duty, driving hard bargains and expecting a similar dedication from less driven colleagues and subordinates. Both men had a strong visual sense, manifesting itself in a care for the look of the books they published, and a passion for collecting paintings, antiques and objets d’art; most importantly, although neither was in any conventional sense a literary man, both were endowed with that inexplicable, almost psychic ability to sniff out a publishable book or series of books without reading more than a page or two of the works in question.
An ardent Devonian, John Lane was born in 1854, and was descended from a long line of farming folk. His father, Lewis, was a tenant farmer near Hartland in north Devon, a rolling landscape of bare, windswept hills and lushly wooded valleys, a mile or so down the road from the jagged black cliffs and foaming seas of Hartland Quay and Morwenstow. ‘In this parish,’ he wrote, ‘I spent my happy, indeed I may say romantic, youth,’ and although Allen Lane’s own connections with the area were fairly remote, the grey little church at Hartland, with its high Perpendicular tower, was to become in due course a shrine to the Williams Lanes as well as to John Lane himself. Unlike his nephew, John Lane showed no interest in farming, but the headmaster of Chulmleigh Academy excited his interest in antiques: as a successful London publisher, he would collect furniture, glass, china, fans and eighteenth-century English portraits.
Eager to make his way in the wider world, John Lane left school at the age of fourteen and took a job in London as a clerk with the Railway Clearing House, which coordinated the activities and services of the innumerable railway companies responsible for shunting passengers and goods about the country. But the railways were not of all-consuming interest, and to supplement his wages Lane started dealing in second-hand books on the side, eventually going into business with the bookseller Elkin Mathews. Together they set up a bookshop on the north side of Vigo Street, naming it The Bodley Head in honour of another bookish Devonian, Sir Thomas Bodley, the founder of the Bodleian Library. But selling antiquarian books was small beer for the forceful, energetic and socially ambitious Lane. ‘I have always been in doubt whether the writing of a great book or the capacity to appreciate it were the finest thing in the world; but I am convinced that the next in importance after the writing and the appreciating is the publishing of it. It was this that led me to regard the starting of a publishing business as a thing to be achieved sooner or later,’ he declared, and in 1889, after Lane had raised £2,000 from a well-disposed lady friend, the two partners launched their new list with a collection of poems by Richard Le Gallienne. The books Lane went on to publish in the 1890s were, in effect, limited editions, with print-runs in the hundreds rather than the thousands; they were much admired for the elegance of their design and typography, with Aubrey Beardsley designing the title pages and bindings for eleven Bodley Head titles, including Oscar Wilde’s Salome, and Charles Ricketts and C. H. Shannon providing a further whiff of the fin de siècle. Specializing in poetry and belles-lettres, the firm became synonymous, in the public mind at least, with the decadent, Romewards-inclined, absinthe-sipping writers of the Nineties – with Lionel Johnson, John Davidson, John Addington Symonds and, above all with The Yellow Book and Oscar Wilde. Although Wilde never contributed to The Yellow Book, the two became inextricably entwined in the outraged and overcharged popular imagination: partly because both seemed redolent of sin and unmentionable goings-on, and partly because Wilde was rumoured, wrongly, to have been clutching a copy of the magazine when he was arrested in the Cadogan Hotel.
Like his nephew in due course, John Lane tried his hand more than once as a magazine publisher: most proved ephemeral and short-lived, and only The Yellow Book and Blast – promoted by Ezra Pound, edited by Wyndham Lewis, and published as war broke out in 1914 – are remembered today. Published in hardback at five shillings, with a sinuous Beardsley line drawing on the cover, the first issue of The Yellow Book appeared in 1894: 7,000 copies were printed, reduced to 5,000 for the second issue. Despite its lurid reputation, and a list of contributors that included Henry James, John Buchan, H. G. Wells, Baron Corvo, Edmund Gosse and Kenneth Grahame, its contents were, for the most part, highly respectable and even rather dull. Beardsley, its Art Editor, loathed Oscar Wilde, who was never asked to contribute; and although Wilde admired Max Beerbohm’s article on cosmetics in the first issue, he told Ricketts how ‘I bought it at the station, but before I had cut all the pages I threw it out of the window.’
John Lane had taken over the stock of Wilde’s Poems from a publisher fallen on hard times, and had gone on to publish Salome, with Beardsley’s illustrations, and Lady Windermere’s Fan. But no love was lost between author and publisher. Wilde – who refused to be described as the ‘author’ in his contracts, insisting on ‘poet’ instead – treated Lane like a tradesman of the merest kind, and made sure that his publishers appreciated their lowly status by bestowing the name ‘Lane’ on a man-servant in The Importance of Being Earnest. Lane, for his part, was outraged to learn that Wilde had seduced the office boy and arranged assignations in the Vigo Street offices. He was on his first trip to New York when he learned of Wilde’s arrest, and decided to stay there until the storm had blown over: the firm’s offices were briefly under siege from a stone-throwing mob, Punch had declared that ‘uncleanliness is next to Bodliness’, and an anonymous wag had implored the publishers to
Give us more of the godly heart
And less of the Bodley Head.
While in New York he instructed Frederic Chapman, his loyal factotum, to withdraw all Wilde’s books from the shops and cancel any outstanding contracts; and while he was at it, he decided to make a clean break with a decadent world by severing all connections with Beardsley as well. Beardsley’s erotic drawings seemed to epitomize the effeteness and corruption of a literary avant-garde from which Lane wanted to distance himself: such forgotten grandees as the poet William Watson and Lord Leighton had threatened to withdraw their work and their support, and Lane sensed where his interests lay. Beardsley’s title of Art Editor was removed from issue No. 5, which was subsequently withdrawn; he transferred his allegiance to the short-lived Savoy magazine and the notorious Leonard Smithers, London’s leading pornographic publisher, and although The Yellow Book limped on to a total of nine issues, it no longer gave off the same frisson as before.
As if to emphasize the need for a fresh start, Lane also dissolved his partnership with the mild and inoffensive Elkin Mathews. They divided their authors between them, and in 1894 Lane moved into a tiny, bow-fronted, black-bricked Regency house on the other side of Vigo Street, at the north end of the Albany: some seventy years later his nephew, in a spasm of nostalgia and family piety, reoccupied the same building as offices for his new hardback imprint, Allen Lane The Penguin Press. With the decadent Nineties firmly behind him, Lane set out to re-establish himself as a less outré, more conventional publisher. He continued to publish poetry, but no longer saw himself as a purveyor of limited editions; prepared to take on established firms like John Murray and Macmillan, as well as such new arrivals as William Heinemann, he branched out into fiction, history, biography, memoirs and the fine arts.
How doth the little busy Lane
Improve the Bodley Head
He gathers round him, day by day,
The authors who are read,
a versifier noted in the year in which Lane parted company with Elkin Mathews. Lane’s change of tack was signalled by the publication of George Egerton’s first novel, Keynotes, in 1895. ‘George Egerton’ was the pseudonym of the beautiful Mrs Egerton Clairmonte; anxious to do his best for his new author, he was keen to publish her novel in paperback but was overruled by cautious booksellers and librarians. He did, however, hijack her title for a new ‘Keynotes’ series of romantic novels; the most successful of his middlebrow novelists was the long-forgotten W. J. Locke, who joined The Bodley Head in the 1890s and went on to produce a stream of bestsellers over the next thirty years.
Occasional bestsellers combined with a dependable backlist were the lifeblood of publishing; but, then as now, publishing was a cash-lungry business, with money tied up in authors’ advances, work-in-progress, slow-moving stock and booksellers reluctant to settle up a minute earlier than necessary; and, like any independent publisher without private means, Lane spent long hours juggling his finances and keeping a keen eye out for rich benefactors prepared to exchange a modest return on their investment for the réclame associated with the literary life. Sometimes referred to as ‘Petticoat Lane’, he enjoyed the company of women, and in 1896, the same year in which he opened a New York office, he met a rich American named Annie Eichberg. Her father, Julius Eichberg, was a musician of German origin. In due course he was appointed Director of the Boston Conservatory, and at the age of fifteen Annie wrote the words for his patriotic hymn ‘To Thee, O Country’ – so earning a pat on the head from Longfellow, who told her that ‘You have covered yourself in glory.’ Annie and her middle-aged admirer were married in 1898, and moved into a large white house in Lancaster Gate Terrace. A generous hostess and an efficient housekeeper, she supervised literary salons, organized musical evenings, wrote books on Anglo-American cultural differences and advised her husband on what to publish at The Bodley Head. Lane’s biographer and onetime employee Lewis May – another Devonian, whose vicar grandfather had married John Lane’s parents – found her hard and somewhat daunting, noting how the shimmering grey metallic silk of her dresses and the whalebone corsets underneath gave her an alarmingly ‘warlike’ appearance.
Lane himself was, by now, a well-known figure on the literary and social scene. ‘Alert, well-groomed, debonair’, a keen clubman, he bustled between Lancaster Gate Terrace, the Bodley Head offices and his house in Brighton, made frequent trips to New York, and attended meetings of the quaintly-named Sette of Odd Volumes. Vigo Street became a kind of literary club where the likes of G. K. Chesterton, H. G. Wells and Arnold Bennett could meet for tea or the occasional slug of whisky. After an unhappy spell with a firm of wholesale grocers in the City, specializing in dried fruit, Ben Travers joined the firm as an apprentice in 1911, his father paying Lane £300 to enable his son to be taken on, in exchange for wages of a pound a week: he remembered how Lane worked in a ‘dim, bottle-glassed little room tucked in beside the main office’, with paintings propped on chairs and against the furniture, and teetering mounds of books and manuscripts all over the floor. The tiny outer office contained four assistants, a lady typist and an office boy, while another secretary and the cashier were housed in the upstairs rooms, reached via a circuitous winding staircase. Although, according to Lewis May, Lane’s ‘knowledge of literature was neither wide nor deep, he had an extraordinary “nose”, as they say’, and his enthusiasm was ‘infectious, irresistible’; Ben Travers remembered how ‘his soft voice and slow smile gave little evidence of his spirit of wild enthusiasm and impulse in the discovery and exploitation of talent’, and was suitably awestruck when The Bodley Head’s reader told him how ‘Lane had a sixth sense which enabled him to discover merit in a derelict manuscript or in some original and revolutionary project without himself ever reading a page or investigating a detail. He hated detail. The whole of his career was one continuous flair.’
Not all Lane’s colleagues or authors were equally admiring. ‘You are such a fraud, you know,’ Le Gallienne once told him, while William Watson spoke of ‘that villain Lane’; but the most damning epithets of all were provided by the misanthropic Frederick Rolfe, alias Baron Corvo, who, after contributing to The Yellow Book, was briefly published by Lane before moving on to Chatto & Windus. His publisher, he informed the reading public, was ‘a tubby little pot-bellied bantam, scrupulously attired and looking as though he had been suckled on bad beer’, ‘a beery insect’, ‘a snivelling little swindler’ and ‘a carroty dwarf with a magenta face and puce pendulous lips’.
Despite the convivial atmosphere of Vigo Street and its high standards of production, authors often followed Baron Corvo’s example and moved elsewhere after publishing their first books with The Bodley Head. ‘I think that authors of first novels received a pretty good hiding from most of the other publishers, but John Lane remunerated them with scorpions,’ Ben Travers remembered: as a tyro novelist, he was offered no advance, no royalties on the first 1,000 copies sold, and a modest royalty on copies sold thereafter, with the same terms applying for the next four books under contract with the firm. Like many publishers of his day, Lane hated the new breed of literary agents, on the grounds that they disrupted the agreeable partnership between publisher and author – or rather the ability of the publisher to dictate terms to his authors, invariably to his own advantage.
But however strained and short-lived Lane’s relations with his authors may have been – after a particularly heated altercation with a. poet, who had smashed a table before stalking out of the office, the publisher ruefully observed that this was ‘one of the sacrifices that mediocrity must needs make to genius’ – he continued, in the years leading up to the First World War, to build up The Bodley Head into one of London’s leading publishers; and this at a time when the number of new titles published every year continued to rise, from 6,456 in 1904 to 9,541 in 1913. He published Arnold Bennett’s first novel, A Man from the North, Chesterton’s Orthodoxy and Wells’s The New Machiavelli; reissued classic authors in the clothbound New Pocket Library, selling at a shilling each, and paperbacked others in the Indian and Colonial Library; and made his mark as a humorist, albeit at one remove, by taking on Saki and Stephen Leacock. Aware of the importance to any publisher of dull but dependable steady-sellers, he started a line in gardening handbooks, published a book on the grapefruit written by Mrs Lane, and gave his support to Airships in Peace and War as well as Houston Stewart Chamberlain’s The Foundation of the Nineteenth Century, a work that would be much admired by the Nazis and was translated from the German by Lord Redesdale, better remembered as the father of the Mitford sisters. When threatened with prosecution for publishing Hermann Sudermann’s The Song of Songs – already toned down for the British market – he sent copies to Shaw, Hardy, Bennett and Wells in the hope that, if called upon, they would testify to its literary merit; so anticipating, albeit unnecessarily, his nephew’s summoning of expert evidence in the Lady Chatterley’s Lover trial fifty years later. He sustained The Bodley Head’s louche reputation by publishing editions of Moll Flanders, Ovid’s Amores and other works with suitably risqué illustrations; and, though no linguist himself, he happily sought his wife’s advice about the work of Continental authors: of these, by far the most successful was Anatole France, the popular edition of whose collected works, priced at 2s. 6d. a volume, was reissued in a striking orange binding.
Ben Travers, best remembered as the author of Rookery Nook and other farces, left to enlist in 1914; other employees included Herbert Jenkins, who went on to found his own firm and publish the works of P. G. Wodehouse, and the long-suffering, ever-anxious Basil Willett, a small, bustling, bespectacled figure who joined the firm from Oxford in 1911 and soon found himself running errands for a boss who seemed to spend less and less time in the office. ‘Will you procure me a box of cigars at about 8d. or 9d. each, as Mrs Lane wants them for Captain Norton-Taylor. Charge it to Mrs Lane, please,’ Lane once instructed his harassed second-in-command. During the war Lane published Ruggles of Red Gap and Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier, interested himself in the plight of Belgian refugees (among them the poet Emile Cammaerts, whose daughter married J. E. Morpurgo, the biographer of Allen Lane and an editor at Penguin), and, after the bombing of 8 Lancaster Gate Terrace, moved to Bath, where he got in touch with his Williams relations in Bristol, and deluged Willett with an unceasing flow of instructions.
The sixteen-year-old Allen Lane started work at Uncle John’s trade counter in Brewer Street on 23 April 1919, less than a fortnight after bidding farewell to Bristol Grammar School: in the years to come, Lane and his brothers would make a special point of celebrating St George’s Day. On the other side of Regent Street from the editorial offices in Vigo Street, the trade counter dealt with the nuts and bolts of the trade – receiving and processing orders from booksellers and wholesalers, sending out review copies, arranging publicity, totting up authors’ royalties – and, for all his family connections, young Lane was expected to learn the business from the bottom up. As office boy and general dogsbody, he worked as a packer and as a ‘looker-out’ – picking particular books off the shelves and matching them up with a bookseller’s order – before graduating to royalties and the accounts department, and his understanding of the trade was improved still further when, in due course, he began to deal with printers, binders, blockmakers and paper merchants; but he really came into his own when he was allowed to go out on the road, first with Uncle John and then on his own account, visiting bookshops in London and the suburbs.
He enjoyed the camaraderie of the trade, the drinks and the gossip; like all the best publishers, he had a good memory for books published by rival firms as well as by The Bodley Head, and, without necessarily reading more than a page or two, had a shrewd sense of which books would, or would not, suit particular shops and buyers. His conviviality, his readiness to combine business with pleasure, and his dashing good looks made him a popular figure in the trade; he thought most bookshops dreary and offputting, but his understanding of and liking for booksellers themselves – not always shared by the grander or more literary type of publisher, uneasy in the company of tradesmen – was to serve him well in the years ahead. Llywelyn Maddock, later a Penguin employee, met Lane when both men were working as publishers’ reps, and was struck by ‘his bright, intelligent eyes, the neatness of his appearance, his charming smile of greeting and respectful friendly interest’; Eric Hiscock, then drumming up publishers’ advertisements for the Evening Standard, and later to be courted by publishers as a tipster par excellence whose endorsement could create a bestseller, remembered him as a ‘humorous, well-dressed figure’, impeccably clad in ‘a blue suit, white silk shirt, blue silk tie, with a fitting blue Melton overcoat over all’, whose ability to extract orders from booksellers was lubricated by a wealth of ‘smoking-room stories’. The reps gathered in Lyons in Ave Maria Lane for tea and gossip before going on to elicit orders from Simpkin Marshall, the once-mighty book wholesalers who were later to be bombed out in the Blitz and finally brought to their knees after being taken over by Robert Maxwell. Thirty years on, writing to thank an old colleague who had written to congratulate him on his knighthood, Lane looked back with a certain nostalgia. ‘It is a far cry,’ he wrote, ‘from the days when you and I traipsed the city streets trying to sell a few books, but I am not sure that wasn’t about the happiest period of my business life.’
Lane was always proud to have started at the bottom, believing that to have done so gave him an understanding of publishing as a whole denied to those who came into the business after university, usually at an editorial level. Jonathan Cape, a publisher he respected more than most, once told him that he didn’t think ‘flair amounts to anything more than having a real solid knowledge of what has gone on in the past, so that you can profit by people’s mistakes and achievements, and you’ve got a smell for what can be done and what can’t be done’. Lane evidently agreed, adding that a publisher ‘can only have got where he is by sheer hard work, and working up from the bottom’. The 1920s saw the rise of the gentleman publisher, and the post-war Bodley Head was heavily staffed by rich young men, educated at public schools and Oxbridge and, as often as not, with money to invest in the firm; but the traditional publisher tended to be a self-taught tradesman from the lower middle classes, very often with a Nonconformist background, who went straight from school to a publisher’s office. The great guru of the trade, Stanley Unwin, with whom Lane was to enjoy a prickly and embattled relationship, was a fine example of the breed. A high-minded teetotaller, with a pointed Elizabethan beard not unlike that sported by Uncle John and a taste for open-necked shirts, he was omniscient about every aspect of publishing and bristled with self-importance; he had been invited into the trade by another childless uncle, T. Fisher Unwin, founded Allen & Unwin in 1914, and was said to have combined business with pleasure at his marriage by signing up the officiating clergyman to write a book for the firm. But many of those with whom Allen Lane was to do business over the years – newcomers to the trade like Hamish Hamilton, Ian Parsons of Chatto & Windus, Fredric Warburg and Rupert Hart-Davis, as well as ‘dynastic’ publishers like ‘Billy’ Collins, Mark Longman and ‘Jock’ Murray – were gentleman publishers; and, unlike them, Lane would never feel entirely at home with the social and literary establishment, preferring to choose as his cronies and closest colleagues people who had been to a provincial university rather than Oxford or Cambridge, or had made their way in the publishing world without the benefits (and drawbacks) of a university education.
His starting wages were a guinea a week, ten shillings of which he put aside for board and lodgings, initially in the drearier suburbs of south-west London. He lodged in Raynes Park with Aunt Lily and Uncle Ted, and in Merton Park with his cousins Pat and Ducka Puxley, who had come up to London from Neath; unable to afford the 12s. 6d. fare back to Bristol at weekends, he gazed longingly at the steam trains as they puffed slowly out of Paddington in a westerly direction, and since he could use his season ticket on Sundays, he sampled a different church every week. Despite some modest rises, his earnings were barely enough to live on: writing to the firm three years after he joined, from a house in Worcester Park, he told his employers that although Mr Crockett, the trade director, had increased his wages by five shillings a week when he became the London rep, he was still out of pocket. His current income was 45s. a week, which boiled down to 43s. 10d. after deducting ‘insurance and employment’: as a result, he found it hard to ‘be affable and keep smiling on my rounds… My two weeks experience in my new job has been full of interest to me, and I hope I can, with tact and intelligence, carry it through to your satisfaction.’ He supplemented his earnings by writing the occasional reader’s report. ‘I like the writer very much; his plot is excellent, but I think he chose rather odd names for the people in the book,’ he wrote of That Girl March by W. H. Rainsford. ‘There is rather a large number of brackets and underlinings; also too many awkward adverbs. The characters are natural, but not like the characters in some books who never make mistakes – they have their little failings like ordinary people…’
In due course he left the suburbs and went to live with Uncle John and Aunt Annie at 8 Lancaster Gate Terrace. It was not, initially, an easy transition: Mrs Lane thought his cousin Pat Puxley a bad influence, and on one occasion he had to be locked in a broom cupboard when her tread was heard in the hall – while Allen found his uncle, who was ill-at-ease with young people, ‘rather difficult to get on with’. But before long his natural sociability and ease of manner asserted themselves, and he was mixing happily with the literary and artistic grandees who flocked to Aunt Annie’s soirées and dinner parties. Uncle John asked Ben Travers, who had rejoined the firm as an author, if he and his wife would keep an eye on his nephew and introduce him to the right sort of people: this proved, for Travers, ‘as easy a job as I’ve ever been asked to do’. ‘You will not suspect me of flattery when I say that I think your nephew is really a delightful fellow. I hope we may make good friends,’ Travers wrote to his host after ‘a most awfully jolly supper’ at Lancaster Gate Terrace. The two young men were to remain friends for life: as for the induction into London life, ‘within a week it was he who was looking after us’, and the sociable young publisher found himself climbing into white tie and tails several evenings a week. One evening Travers invited him to a banquet at the Fishmongers’ Hall, at the end of which the guests were each given a set of silver gilt cufflinks for themselves and a four-pound box of chocolates to take home to the ladies. Bored by the long-winded after-dinner speeches, they escaped the proceedings, only to find themselves in the room in which the guest speaker had been primed with brandy and cigars. After helping themselves to huge quantities of free drink, they set off back to Lancaster Gate Terrace for a night-cap: Lane skidded on the door-mat and grabbed hold of a grandfather clock which crashed down upon him, arousing an irate Uncle John from his slumbers.
Despite such débĊcles, and his modest status in the firm, Lane began to be treated like an heir-apparent by Uncle John, who encouraged him to attend directors’ meetings even though he was not yet in a position to do so, and sent him off to meet important authors. He visited W. J. Locke at his villa on the Riviera, where he was impressed by the seven bathrooms on offer, and no doubt took careful note of his host’s much-quoted advice to ‘Never lose an opportunity, nor a visiting card.’ Uncle and nephew attended a dinner given by A. J. A. Symons’s First Edition Club, along with such luminaries of the period as Sir Israel Gollancz, Ambrose Heal, Gordon Selfridge and Philip Sassoon, and the fresh-faced young man was sent down to Max Gate to meet the aged Thomas Hardy. The poet John Drinkwater and his wife made up the party, and it was suggested that Mrs Drinkwater might like to play a medley of Dorset folksongs on the piano. Hardy bustled round looking for the scores, and ‘when he found them he was as excited as a child, and listened with rapt attention while Mrs Drinkwater played his favourite tunes’. Hardy then offered his guests some chocolate biscuits wrapped in tinfoil; Drinkwater absent-mindedly twisted his foil into the shape of a chalice, and after tea was over Lane slipped it into his pocket as a souvenir. Hardy went on to complain about the pestilential ways of autograph-hunters, one of whom, an American, had bought up the entire stock of his works from the bookshop in Dorchester and trundled them out to Max Gate in a wheelbarrow for the great man’s signature. Little did he realize that his young guest would become one of the foremost autograph hounds of modern times. One evening Mrs Lane took the young publisher to a meeting addressed by Bernard Shaw. Allen Lane asked GBS to autograph his programme, to which the sage replied, ‘Young man, why waste your time in chasing people for their autographs when you might be using it so much more profitably in making your own worthwhile?’ Years later, undaunted by Shaw’s disapproval, Lane made a point of collecting a signed copy of every Penguin he published. More often than not this was a straightforward proceeding – the authors were flattered to be sent a copy for signature, and happily obliged – but if a writer proved unwilling or evasive, a signature would be scissored off the bottom of a letter, or even a contract, and pasted into place. More than once Lane or his secretary unwittingly asked for the signature of a long-dead author; Ben Glazebrook at Constable returned a Penguin awaiting signature with a note pointing out that Katherine Mansfield had been dead for over forty years, while Roger Machell at Hamish Hamilton regretted that he was unable to provide signatures from Jean Paul Sartre, who never replied to letters, or from the reclusive J. D. Salinger, who loathed all publishers, and paperback publishers most of all.
Perhaps the most revered writer on The Bodley Head’s list was Anatole France, famed as an iconoclast and as the author of Penguin Island. Since Allen was credited with schoolboy French, Uncle John sent him to Paris to meet the magus. Lane and Lewis May were given an audience at the Villa Said, at the same time as the excitable editor of Paris Soir. Lane had prepared a long and gracious speech in honour of his firm’s eminent author, but was so over-awed and tongue-tied by France’s long white beard, ankle-length silk dressing-gown and red skull-cap that he never got beyond ‘Enchanté, monsieur’; after which the editor of Paris Soir, who had seemed ‘a little restive’ before they were admitted into the great man’s presence, ‘fell on his hands and knees, pausing every now and again to bow’ before delivering a lengthy panegyric of ‘fiery eloquence’, at the end of which he seized Anatole France’s hand and pressed it to his lips. Uncle John sent his nephew back to Paris for France’s funeral in 1924, and while there he paid the first of many visits to André Maurois. Lane claimed in later years that Maurois’s The Silence of Colonel Bramble was the first book he worked on at The Bodley Head: Ariel, his biography of Shelley, was published by the firm in the year of Anatole France’s death, and would be reissued in paperback as the very first Penguin book. Maurois was a well-known anglophile and had served as a liaison officer with the British Army during the First World War, so they almost certainly spoke to each other in English: Dick fondly believed that his older brother was ‘bi-lingual’ in French and English, but since he also tells us how Lane confused fromage with homard in a restaurant in Paris, so lumbering himself with two unwanted plates of lobster mayonnaise, he cannot be trusted on that score.
When not consorting with Bernard Shaw, John Galsworthy, Max Beerbohm and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in Lancaster Gate Terrace, Lane hurried off to evening classes in design at the Regent Street Polytechnic, and struggled in vain to master shorthand and typing at Pitman’s. Keen to ride in his spare time, he joined the Territorial Army, attending parades and even summer camps with the Sussex and Surrey Yeomanry and, later, the Essex Artillery. He was invited, in full uniform, to attend a levée at Buckingham Palace; his spurs locked together when he was summoned to meet the King, and he found himself gliding forward like an ice-skater in slow motion. He enjoyed another brush with royalty when Uncle John acquired a glass goblet which had once belonged to a Prince of Wales, and decided to present it to the current incumbent, the future Edward VIII. The Prince accepted Lane’s offer, but told him that he wanted to sign its base with a diamond pen. Hurrying to obey the royal command, Lane sent his nephew off to a West End jeweller to borrow a pen and learn how to use it. Back in the office, Allen practised his signature on one of the mullioned windows before taking both goblet and pen round to St James’s Palace. Eventually a rather nondescript young man sidled into the room, clad in flannels and a tweed jacket; Lane had no idea who he was, and paid him no attention until the Prince introduced himself and asked to be shown how to use the diamond pen. Unable to master it, he dashed the pen to the ground in a rage before finally inscribing his signature; Allen took the goblet back to the office, added his own signature alongside the Princes, and posted it back to the palace. The mullioned window bearing his signature was still there when he re-acquired the Vigo Street offices in 1966.
At some point in the early Twenties, John Lane decided to turn The Bodley Head into a limited company. Rival publishers were providing stiff competition, entertaining in style was proving wretchedly expensive, costs were steadily rising, and the middle-class, middlebrow market on which hardback firms like The Bodley Head depended to make a living found its funds being steadily eroded by inflation and higher taxation. Despite Annie Lane’s wealth, the firm was, as always, strapped for cash, and Lane needed to find some rich young men with money to spare. Neither Willett, who had been made managing director in 1920, nor Crockett had private means, and they could only afford a handful of shares, but two new directors who joined in 1919 were in a position to invest £10,000 apiece – an enormous sum in those days. Hubert Carr-Gomme, a former Liberal MP and private secretary to Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, was never much more than a sleeping partner, albeit of an irritable kind, but Ronald Boswell, who joined shortly after leaving Oxford, was a more influential and active participant. Of, presumably, German origin – as was the custom at the time, his original surname, Bussweiller, was printed in brackets under its anglicized version in the list of directors on the firm’s notepaper – he was a man of liberal views, eager to publish books on current affairs and politics of a left-wing persuasion, and, according to Edward Young, later to be a key member of the original Penguin team, ‘responsible for a tremendous library of psychology and sexology’. And in 1924 Allen Lane himself was made a director, as was an affable, well-connected character called Lindsay Drummond, who was a cousin of the Marquess of Northampton and invested another £10,000.
Unlike the old guard of Willett and Crockett, Allen Lane was soon on easy and familiar terms with the younger Bodley Head authors; and with none more so than Agatha Christie, who became a lifelong friend. She had written her first crime novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, when she was seventeen, and after it had been turned down by innumerable publishers she sent it to The Bodley Head. She heard nothing for two years, but was eventually summoned to meet John Lane, ‘a small man with a white beard, behind a desk in a roomful of pictures, looking Elizabethan, as if he should have been a portrait himself, with a ruff round his neck’; with his ‘shrewd twinkling blue eyes’ he looked more like ‘an old-fashioned sea captain’ than a conventional publisher. The firm’s reader thought her book ‘worth publishing’, though he doubted whether ‘anybody would be allowed to give evidence in the way that the Belgian detective does it’, and on the strength of this Lane decided that her novel ‘might have possibilities’, and offered her an advance of £25 and a five-book contract: she always felt that he had taken advantage of her, and escaped to Collins as soon as she decently could. In Allen Lane, on the other hand, she found a kindred spirit, and whereas her letters to Mr Willett were stiff and plaintive, with much grumbling about the jacket artwork and his maddening inability to remember to include a dedication page, she was very quickly addressing her letters to ‘Allen, my dear’ and joshing him about his endless cocktail parties and over-convivial evenings. Lane liked to claim that he devoured her first novel while licking stamps in the office, and they first met after she had called in at Vigo Street to complain about a proposed jacket illustration for her second novel, which ‘represented a man in pyjamas apparently having an epileptic fit on a golf links’. ‘My first impression of Allen Lane has always stayed with me,’ she wrote after his death. ‘An impression of vigorous youth and a kind of attractive eagerness – someone very much alive, stretching out towards life and exhibiting a gaiety and friendliness that were immediately endearing.’ But she had few illusions about her new friend where business was concerned. ‘Allen, isn’t it about a year since I had any royalties from you?’ she would ask from time to time: ‘I wondered whether you’d notice,’ he’d reply, looking ‘half-guilty, half-mischievous’. But for all that, she allowed him, in due course, to reissue The Mysterious Affair at Styles in The Bodley Head’s unsuccessful series of ninepenny paperbacks and again in the first batch of ten titles to be published by Penguin; and although she remained faithful to Collins for the rest of her writing career, many years later she persuaded a reluctant Billy Collins, who was always uneasy about her friendship with Lane, to sub-lease a batch of her titles to Penguin.
Agatha Christie lived in Torquay, which appealed to the Devonian in Lane, and whenever he went to stay they trawled round the bookshops together and spent long hours ‘popping in and out of antique shops’. They were joined by a third party when she wrote to say that she was marrying for the second time, to an archaeologist a good deal younger than herself who ‘never speaks’. Silent or not, Max Mallowan was to become a good friend, and, in due course, the adviser to Pelican Books on archaeological subjects and authors. Years later, Mallowan and his wife invited Lane to visit them in Iraq, where they were excavating the ancient city of Nimrud; he remembered his guest as ‘a man of boundless energy, an opportunist, a born pirate, ready to take on anything’, who would ‘ride roughshod over his best friend’ and ‘expected and never resented opportunism’.
The piratical Uncle John, in the meantime, showed few signs of slowing down. ‘The burden of his seventy years lay, or seemed to lie, easily upon him,’ Lewis May recalled. ‘He was full of ideas, as full of energy as ever.’ But the young J. B. Priestley, then employed by the firm as a reader, thought Lane ‘ancient: small and bearded, puckered and peeping – his sight was so bad that he could no longer read’. In January 1925 Uncle John and Annie went down to their house in Brighton for the weekend. It was damp and foggy; Lane felt unwell and took to his bed, where he insisted on dictating letters and making phone calls. Pneumonia set in, and within a fortnight he was dead. DEATH OF FAMOUS PUBLISHER, ran a headline the following day; he was cremated at Golders Green, and after a memorial service in St James’s Piccadilly his ashes were taken to St Nectan’s church in Hartland. Allen Lane was ill with scarlet fever, but Dick – recently returned from four years in Australia, where he had worked on a fruit farm and as a jackaroo on a sheep station in the outback of New South Wales – accompanied Aunt Annie on the long journey down to Devon. Not long afterwards she received a letter from J. B. Priestley in which he spoke of her husband’s ‘friendly and very charming personality’, and of how ‘his confidence and unflagging zest made my work a pleasure’. But all was not well at The Bodley Head: according to Stanley Unwin, who was in a position to know, the firm was insolvent at the time of its founder’s death, and remained so until a receiver was appointed eleven years later, in 1936. Faced with financial problems and, as it turned out, the hostility of his fellow-directors, Allen Lane set out to claim his inheritance.