Quite when, where and even whether Allen Lane first had the notion of Penguin books is a matter of debate. According to the standard version of events, he was coming back to London from a weekend with Agatha Christie and Max Mallowan in Devon, realized he had nothing to read on the train, and was so appalled by the rubbish on offer at the railway bookstall on Exeter station that he decided, there and then, that he would remedy matters by producing a line of paperbacks that cost no more each than a packet of cigarettes, looked bright and elegant rather than garish, and included worthwhile works of literature instead of lightweight ephemera. Others came up with very different versions of the story, or were keen to deny him the originality claimed on his behalf. Lane, for his part, combined personal modesty with single-minded determination, an entrepreneur’s instinct for the spirit of the age, and a readiness to exploit and realize the talents and achievements of others: he made Penguin into one of the most famous and distinctive brand names in British business life, as instantly recognizable as Guinness or Rolls-Royce, and if, in later years, he was irritated by the way in which – like ‘hoover’, ‘mackintosh’ or ‘biro’ in their respective fields – ‘Penguin’ was used as a synonym for ‘paperback’, he had only his own success to blame; nor was it surprising that the world at large should assume that he, and he alone, had invented the paperback. Like many others at the time, he was convinced that there was a vast new readership waiting to be tapped: intuitive as ever, he set about putting his hunches into effect at a time when Britain was coming out of recession, yet the conventional book trade retained the siege mentality of men who felt that their livelihood was under threat, not least from his activities. Quick, impatient and possessed of a contagious enthusiasm, Lane was, by 1934, poised to put his plans into action.
One of the constants of English history is an ever-rising middle class, and never more so than in the fifty years that led up to the outbreak of the Second World War. An expanding middle class with a degree of disposable income was good news for publishers of books, magazines and newspapers, and Lane – like Northcliffe, Newnes and, later, Lord Beaverbrook – was to make his fortune from its desire to be entertained and instructed by means of the written word. Forster’s Education Act of 1870 was bearing fruit by the turn of the century; the proliferation of office jobs – in the financial sector, in estate agencies, in businesses of every kind – presupposed a degree of literacy, and although the intelligentsia despised and feared the perky, lower-middle-class clerks of the kind immortalized in Three Men in a Boat, The Diary of a Nobody and the early novels of H. G. Wells, publishers saw them as welcome new recruits. George Newnes’s Tit-Bits combined hints on social etiquette, bicycling columns and snippets of self-improvement with extracts from the classics, leading John Carey to suggest, subversively, that ‘as a means of awakening interest in books, arousing curiosity and introducing its readers to new ideas, Tit-Bits must compare very favourably with more acclaimed organs such as T. S. Eliot’s Criterion and F. R. Leavis’s Scrutiny, and its effects were infinitely more widespread’; Newnes’s Strand Magazine was, as we have seen, a popular item with the Williams family in Bristol. And the most famous press baron of all, Lord Northcliffe, had founded the Daily Mail in 1896 to cater for the new world of office-workers, and followed it up, five years later, with the Daily Mirror, designed at first for lady readers.
Book publishers were equally anxious to tap this new market. Years earlier, in 1848, W. H. Smith had inaugurated its chain of railway bookstalls. Their immediate effect was to trigger off a proliferation of cheap reprints – shilling in hardback, sixpence in paper – aimed at the bookless traveller avid for something to read on the journey. Printed, for the most part, in double columns in a typeface so small as to be almost illegible, they included such long-forgotten series as Bohn’s Shilling Library, Roudedge’s Railway Library and the Fireside Library; most were ephemeral trash, with lurid covers and advertisements printed on the back and the inside covers, though John Dicks’s Illustrated Novels, published in the 1880s at sixpence each, included works by Dickens, Harrison Ainsworth and other eminent Victorians. New paper-making techniques – esparto grass was used from the 1860s, wood pulp from the 1880s – made such cheap editions still cheaper to produce, to the horror of the literate classes: in the vanguard of those who hurried to defend the heights of literature was Matthew Arnold, who attacked ‘a cheap literature, hideous and ignoble of aspect, like the tawdry novels which flare in the bookshelves of our railway stations, and which seem designed, as so much else that is produced for our middle class seems designed, for people with a low standard of life’.
Although the demise of the mid-Victorian three-decker novel in favour of shorter works meant that the price of a new novel fell from 31s. 6d. for a set of three to 7s. 6d. for a single volume – a price for new fiction that remained constant from the turn of the century until the outbreak of the Second World War – new novels remained far too expensive for all but the well-heeled. The classics, on the other hand, had always lent themselves to cheap editions: royalties were not payable on out-of-copyright titles, and competition among publishers was intense from the 1830s onwards. W. T. Stead’s Penny Poets and Penny Novels, both familiar from Lane’s childhood, began to appear in the mid-Nineties, and went on to sell some 9 million copies in toto; but the best-remembered series of all – appealing, in part, to those earnest, high-minded, self-taught working-class and lower-middle-class readers who, more often than not, professed themselves Fabian socialists, rode bicycles, read H. G. Wells and Bernard Shaw, wore ‘rational’ clothing, and attended university extension courses and, in later years, the Workers’ Educational Association – were the product of the Edwardian age. Grant Richards founded the World’s Classics in 1901 – when he went bankrupt four years later, the list was acquired by Oxford University Press – and he was quickly followed by Collins Pocket Classics and Nelson’s Classics: but the best known of all was Everyman’s Library, founded by J. M. Dent in 1906.
The son of a Darlington house-painter, self-taught and Nonconformist, Dent was typical of the old-fashioned tradesman publisher. ‘My aim was to publish a volume of 500 pages for one shilling,’ he wrote – a shilling being ‘the democratic price’. Anticipating Allen Lane’s practice at Penguin, he published new titles in batches, reckoning he had to sell 10,000 of each to cover its costs, and insisted that his books should be good to look at as well as to read: the early Everymans are redolent of William Morris and the Kelmscott Press, all twining shrubbery and sinuous forms, but in the 1930s they were given a cleaner, more modern look, including endpapers, jackets and title-page motifs designed by Eric Ravilious. By then they were also buying in the hardback reprint rights from other publishers. Back in 1907 H. G. Wells had asked Macmillan to sublease his Kipps to the Nelson’s Sevenpenny Library, where it sold 43,000 copies in the first year alone, and Everyman’s Library went on to include works by Virginia Woolf, Conrad, Synge, Aldous Huxley and E. M. Forster among the 1,000-odd titles it had on offer. Not all Everyman readers were upwardly mobile spirits, bent on self-improvement: but a generation after the first Everyman appeared, the same kind of readers would be snapping up Penguins, Pelicans and, in due course, Penguin Classics.
By the 1920s most publishers were reissuing titles in the hardback ‘cheap editions’ familiar to Lane at The Bodley Head. At 3s. 6d., or occasionally 2s. 6d., apiece, these were more expensive than the Classics lists: their titles were almost invariably in copyright and were burdened with royalties, and the print-runs were generally shorter. A book would be published first as a conventional hardback – 7s. 6d. for a novel, 12s. 6d. for a travel book, biography or history – and then, when the publisher reckoned that sales of the full-priced edition had ground to a halt, it would be reissued, for a ‘further bite of the cherry’, as publishers liked to put it, in a cheap edition. Many of these, like Cape’s Travellers’ Library or Chatto’s Phoenix Library, were elegant, pocket-sized volumes; others included Heinemann’s Windmill Library, Secker’s Adelphi Library and, at two shillings each, the Hodder Yellow Jackets, which reissued such fine storytellers as Sapper, Buchan, Baroness Orczy and A. E. W. Mason, and would, in due course, be dealt a ‘murderous blow’ by the sixpenny Penguins.
Paperbacks were generally regarded as a lower form of life; and, if the old order had its way, would remain forever incarcerated in the literary bargain basement. Book trade historians trace them back to the days of Aldus Manutius in the early sixteenth century, but by the time Lane was pondering Penguins, the paperback had fallen on hard times. As the publisher Robert Lusty recalled in his memoirs, sixpenny paperbacks were a commonplace long before Penguins appeared. A good many of them were published by the half-mad, power-crazed Walter Hutchinson, who collected publishing houses in much the same way as others collect stamps or racehorses; George Hutchinson, the founder of the firm, had initiated a series of paperback Sixpenny Blacks, but by the time Lusty joined the ramshackle empire paperbacks were reserved for the most rubbishy thrillers and romances, printed in double columns and with lurid covers to match.
There were, however, sporadic exceptions to the assumption that paperbacks were synonymous with tosh. In the 1920s, Victor Gollancz, who had abandoned schoolmastering for life as a publisher and was learning the trade at Ernest Benn, started, with Douglas Jerrold, Benn’s Sixpenny Library, a line of small format, very short paperbacks designed to provide the lay reader with useful background information and introductions to seemingly daunting subjects: Bertrand Russell produced a primer to philosophy, C. E. M. Joad pondered The Mind and its Workings, and the history of England was summarized in the minimum number of pages. By enlisting well-known academics to explain their subjects to the lay reader, they had something in common with Lane’s Pelicans, but their brevity and dingy brown paper covers told against them. A few years later Gollancz, by now the master of his own firm, decided to have another crack at paperbacks. In 1930 he published several new novels as paperback originals, selling at 3s. each and bearing the generic name of Mundanus paperbacks. ‘VG’ declared his new series to be ‘both socially desirable and commercially profitable’, but although the first three titles sold between 10,000 and 20,000 each, newsagents withheld their support and the scheme collapsed. ‘How dare you! I am incapable of error!’ the volcanic Gollancz once roared at a literary agent who had dared to disagree, but the failure of Mundanus suggests that he was as fallible as any of his rivals.
A longer-lasting and more valuable contribution to the notion that paperbacks and quality were compatible was provided by the Tauchnitz and Albatross Continental Editions. Baron Tauchnitz had begun to reissue his Continental editions of works by British and American writers in 1847, and by the 1930s the firm had published over 5,000 books. Tauchnitz editions could only be sold on the continent of Europe, and this gave them a certain glamour, indicative of foreign travel and exotic goings-on: Allen Lane remembered his father reading to him from a Tauchnitz edition of · Kipling’s Just So Stories, smuggled over the Channel by some intrepid traveller. From the earliest days, Tauchnitz had insisted on paying royalties to the authors on his list, at a time when piracy was rife, particularly in the United States; Tauchnitz editions had come to be well regarded by writers and their agents, who were happy to assign them the Continental rights in their books, however much their publishers in London or New York may have resented losing sales in Europe to cheaper German paperbacks.
By the early 1930s, Tauchnitz editions, with their squat format, drab covers and impossibly long lines of type, were beginning to look dowdy and old-fashioned. In 1931 Kurt Enoch, a young German publisher, was approached by the British Holding Company about the possibility of their setting up a rival firm which would break the Tauchnitz monopoly on Continental editions, and a year later Albatross Verlag was in business. Its ultimate owner, Sir Edmund Davis, was a South African copper magnate; its chairman was Arnoldo Mondadori, the Italian publisher, and there were two members of the Collins family on the board. Kurt Enoch, based in Hamburg, looked after promotion and distribution; Max Christian Wegner, who had been sacked from Tauchnitz after suggesting that they should modernize the appearance of their books, supervised editorial and production matters from Paris; the great typographer and book designer Hans (or Giovanni) Mardersteig, a German based in Verona, designed a narrow, elegant and legible page and a spare, modern-looking cover design, both far removed from Tauchnitz’s lumpish equivalents; and John Holroyd-Reece, fluent in German, French, Italian and English, liaised with the British Holding Company and negotiated with publishers, agents and authors in London or at his villa on the Côte d’Azur.
Of all those involved, Kurt Enoch would have the longest association with Allen Lane, and make the strongest mark on the publishing world; but John Holroyd-Reece – ‘that urbane and picturesque international’, in the words of the literary agent Curtis Brown, who claimed to have introduced him to Wegner – was by far the most fascinating. Born Hermann Riess in 1897 to a German Jewish father and an English mother, he had been educated at Repton, where he was allegedly cited as a precocious co-respondent, and had turned down a place at King’s College, Cambridge, in order to join the Dorset Yeomanry; he became a member of the Egyptian Expeditionary Force, and in 1918 was said to have been appointed Governor of Zable and Malloake in Sudan. A director of various Paris banks and insurance companies, and of the Musée Ethnographique du Trocadéro, he was, at some stage, made a Knight Commander of the Crown of Italy. He had worked for Ernest Benn in the 1920s and got to know Victor Gollancz, who sporadically employed him as a European ‘scout’. An enthusiastic collector of antiques, he founded the Paris-based Pegasus Press in 1927, specializing in expensive and handsomely produced books on fine art: his Odyssey Press, based in Hamburg, took over publication of Sylvia Beach’s edition of Ulysses in 1932, and with Jonathan Cape he co-published Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness, so making it available in Europe at least after its condemnation in the British courts. Kurt Enoch, an austere soul, thought Holroyd-Reece extravagant and prone to delusions of grandeur, with a ‘personality bordering on that of an adventurer’, and disapproved of his appetite for hunting and the aristocracy; although Paul Léon, James Joyce’s secretary, remembered him as being rather red in the face, David Higham, the literary agent, recalled him as a pallid, monocled figure, invariably clad in black, who ‘somehow gave off a sinister vapour’ and turned up in London from time to time ‘with a handsome wife – never ask him whose’ (in addition to other people’s wives, he had five of his own); Nicolas Barker has described him as a ‘creature of grandiose schemes’ who ‘flashed across the typographical world like a comet’, dragging in his wake such eminences as Stanley Morison, Mardersteig, Oliver Simon and Beatrice Warde, each of whom he dropped in due course, leaving them ‘breathless, exhilarated and sometimes very much the poorer’.
Albatross published in batches of four new titles a month, and their books were more up-to-date than those on offer from Tauchnitz: James Joyce’s Dubliners was the opening title, published in 1932, and before long he had been joined by Aldous Huxley, Virginia Woolf and Sinclair Lewis. At a less elevated level, A. A. Milne and Edgar Wallace were admitted to the list, and the various categories of book – travel, crime, belles-lettres or whatever – were designated an identifying colour, in much the same way that Penguins would be coded orange for fiction, blue for biography, green for crime and magenta for travel: emulation is endemic to publishing, and the Albatross colour-coding was itself a variant on the coloured bands used by Tauchnitz to identify different types of book. Unable to compete with its stylish new rival, Tauchnitz began to discuss a possible merger between the two firms. The Nazis, by now in power in Germany, objected to British ownership of Tauchnitz, and still more so since Sir Edmund Davis was Jewish, so a deal was worked out whereby Oscar Brandstetter, the firm’s printer in Leipzig, bought the company but handed over editorial, sales and distribution to Albatross.
Despite its elegance, and the distinction of its list, Albatross’s moment was all too brief. Kurt Enoch, who was Jewish, left Hamburg and settled in Paris, where he continued to work on behalf of Albatross; Stanley Unwin later claimed that authors resented having to sign a form declaring that they were of suitably Aryan descent. Tauchnitz and Albatross coexisted for a time, with the older firm looking after the more old-fashioned or middlebrow authors; Tauchnitz editions were remodelled along slimmer, more elegant lines, with a large letter ‘A’ on the front, designed by Reynolds Stone. But eventually Penguin would deprive both lists of their raison d’être: with all the world its marketplace, it could, with far longer printruns, undercut and outsell its German competitors. With the outbreak of war, Tauchnitz began to specialize in German-language books; after the war, efforts were made to revive both imprints, but to no avail. The influence of Albatross in particular on the development of Penguin, in terms of both design and content, was both beneficial and undeniable. While still at The Bodley Head, Lane had been in touch with Holroyd-Reece about the possibility of their two firms sharing printing costs on certain titles; years later, Holroyd-Reece told Ved Mehta that Lane adopted the Penguin format ‘as a result of detailed discussions with me before he formed his company’, but that it would be wrong to suggest that he simply copied Albatross. Mardersteig, he claimed, had been working on some unpublished notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci, in which Leonardo had ‘determined an ideal page size’; Mardersteig had then followed this ruling, and Lane, in turn, ‘copied it no more than I did’.
By the late 1920s the British book trade felt increasingly embattled, and although it weathered the Depression better than some trades, a vague feeling that something should be done to tap new markets and make books more accessible was combined with innate conservatism and hostility to change. And new media were competing for the public’s attention and pocket money. By 1935 there were 4,500 cinemas up and down the country, and the British were being acclaimed (or reviled) as the world’s most ardent film-goers. The BBC came into being, albeit under a slightly different name, in 1922, and although under the austere and high-minded control of Lord Reith, its Director-General from 1927 to 1938, it only offered one station to its listeners, 71 per cent of the population had a radio licence by 1939; and whereas in 1918 the national daily newspapers sold some 3.1 million copies per day in toto, that figure had soared to 10.6 million twenty years later, with two papers boasting circulations of over 2 million, and a further three with over a million each. Shrewd publishers exploited radio and the Press via reviews, free publicity and the sale of serial and broadcasting rights; their less adventurous colleagues trembled and hoped for the best.
Equally worrying to the old order of publishers was their increasing dependence on the library market, and, in particular, on the ‘twopenny libraries’ which lent books to subscribers at twopence a time. Boots, with 460 branches up and down the country, combined the sale of aspirins and toothbrushes with the loan of books, as did their rivals Timothy Whites; although W. H. Smith had fallen between its pharmacist rivals, Foyles soon entered the market, boasting that at any one time some three-quarters of a million books were out on loan. Some cheap editions were bestsellers in their own right – Cassell sold 20,000 of Warwick Deeping’s Sorrell and Son at the full price of 7s. 6d., over a million at 3s. 6d. – but most publishers relied on the library market for their well-being; and anything which threatened that benign dependence was to be deplored.
Heretical spirits, however, came up with ideas that threatened the status quo. W. H. Smith, which took a dim view of any new initiatives, whether book tokens, book clubs or sixpenny paperbacks, were committed to keeping prices high in the interests of both publishers and booksellers, but in 1929 a Mr Chapell of their advertising department suggested that they should start a line of ‘cheap shops’ selling ‘cheap books’ as a means of boosting trade in the year of the Great Crash, and attracting new business. ‘This is an age of cheapness,’ he declared, ‘and all classes – even the Queen herself – have patronized Woolworth’s. There is a limit to the amount of business to be obtained from the cultured classes to whom our handsome shops mainly appeal.’ His suggestion that Smith’s should follow the example of Woolworth’s, famed for selling nothing over sixpence, was rejected by his superiors: but it was a straw in the wind, and Woolworth’s was to loom large in the whole vexed issue of cheap reading matter, and Penguins in particular.
The more conventional publishers and booksellers were united in their initial hostility to new ideas. Harold Raymond of Chatto & Windus came up with the idea of book tokens in 1928, but it took four years before his scheme was put into effect by booksellers worried that parents would use the tokens to buy their children’s school textbooks; Tommy Joy, who ended his career running Hatchard’s bookshop in Piccadilly, suggested that publishers should reduce their ‘over-stocks’ (books that had ceased to sell and were clogging up the warehouse) by means of an annual National Book Sale, but had to wait till the 1950s before his plan was accepted; when Collins, the most commercially minded of publishers, tried, in 1934, to launch a line of clothbound ‘Sevenpennies’ they were forced to withdraw on the ground that such books would destroy the market for hardbacks, and for cheap editions in particular. Despite a resolution made two years earlier by a joint committee of publishers and booksellers to the effect that ‘in the present times of economic depression the book-buying public could not afford large and expensive books and therefore attention should be directed to books of lower price’, rhetoric and action remained far removed from one another.
Further irritants took the form of book clubs, and the sale of books by newspapers in exchange for coupons. German by origin, book clubs sprang up in America in the 1920s in the form of the Book of the Month Club and the Literary Guild, both of which offered their members new books at prices lower than those in the shops. In 1929 Alan Bott founded the Book Society: although its members were not offered a discount on their choices, the publishers whose books were chosen could, in principle, take advantage of the longer print-runs resulting from the Society’s order to reduce the published price to members and bookshop buyers alike. Bott’s selection committee included Hugh Walpole and J. B. Priestley, and the Society was felt to embody the solid, unadventurous tastes of a public devoted to thrillers, P. G. Wodehouse, A. J. Cronin, golf and crossword puzzles: the Cambridge-based critic Queenie Leavis, who would soon be savaging the debased values of commercial publishing, the mass market and the metropolitan literary scene in Fiction and the Reading Public, despised it for promoting a ‘middlebrow standard of values’, and the writers it exalted were exactly those whom Cyril Connolly so lethally derided in his New Statesman fiction reviews and in his parodies of literary life. Later in the decade the wrath of the booksellers would be excited by those clubs which provided books to their members at a fraction of the published price – John Baker’s Readers’ Union, founded in 1937, offered 15s. and 10s. books to its 17,000 members for as little as 2s. 6d. – on the grounds that they not only deprived long-suffering booksellers of legitimate full-price sales, but implied that all hardback titles were grossly overpriced.
A more immediate menace resulted from the newspaper circulation wars of the early 1930s. Increasingly dependent on advertising, and desperate to bolster their circulations, the middlebrow papers sought to win new readers by offering them the complete works of Dickens and Shakespeare, cookery books and encyclopedias far more cheaply than they were available in the shops. The Daily Mail offered a complete set of Shakespeare in exchange for 5s. 9d. and six coupons cut from the paper; in 1934 the Daily Herald offered a special edition of all Bernard Shaw’s plays – including three not included in the Constable edition, priced at 12s. 6d. – in exchange for six coupons and 3s. 9d. Shaw’s ready acceptance of the Herald’s offer, despite the opposition of his publisher, was widely resented in the trade. Utterly unrepentant, GBS wrote a defiant letter on the subject to the Bookseller. ‘This particular transaction will increase the business of every bookseller in the country by adding to the book-reading public many thousands of customers to whom 12s. 6d. books are as inaccessible as Rolls-Royce cars,’ he declared. ‘If the Woolworth firm sends me an order of sufficient magnitude to enable it to sell copies through its stores for 6d. and yet give me a better return from my labour than I can obtain through prices that are prohibitive for nine-tenths of the population, I shall execute that order joyfully. And let the bookseller who would do otherwise cast the first stone at me.’ To Basil Blackwell, who claimed that the newspaper’s edition had ‘placed those booksellers in the unfortunate position of having deceived the public’, he was equally unbending. ‘I can do nothing for the booksellers but tell them not to be childish,’ he wrote. He had recently received from America ‘two orders of 50,000 copies each from book clubs, to be given away to their members for nothing, as a bonus’, and ‘of course, I accepted both’. He was, he went on, ‘looking forward to an order from Woolworth’s for a sixpenny edition’. ‘Have you no bowels of compassion for the millions of your fellow-countrymen who can no more afford a twelve-and-sixpenny book than a trip round the world? I am really surprised at you. When we met at Bumpus’s you seemed quite an intelligent youth.’ Authors were, on the whole, far better disposed towards the notion of cheap books than publishers or booksellers, and Shaw was more passionate than most. He would, in due course, become a keen supporter of Penguin Books, and be a godfather to the Pelican list; no doubt Allen Lane read his defiant letter in the Bookseller, and was heartened by his words.
That same year another highly successful champion of the ‘little man’, J. B. Priestley, published English Journey, based on his travels round the country. In it he famously declared that there were now three Englands: the old, rustic England of castles and yokels and country inns; the England of the Industrial Revolution, blighted by unemployment and now in apparently irremediable decline; and ‘the new post-war England, belonging far more to the age itself than to this particular island’. It was, he suggested, American in inspiration, a land of ‘arterial and by-pass roads, of filling-stations and factories that look like exhibition buildings, of giant cinemas and dance-halls and cafés, bungalows with tiny garages, cocktail bars, Woolworth’s, motor coaches, wireless, hiking, factory girls looking like actresses, greyhound racing and dirt tracks, swimming-pools and everything given away for cigarette coupons’. Based, for the most part, in the London suburbs and the Home Counties, this new England was ‘essentially democratic… You need money in this England, but you do not need much money. It is a large-scale, mass-production job, with cut prices. You could almost accept Woolworth’s as its symbol.’ Seven years later another astute observer of the English social scene came to similar conclusions. ‘The place to look for the germs of the future England is in light-industry areas and along the arterial roads,’ George Orwell wrote in The Lion and the Unicorn. ‘It is a rather restless, cultureless life, centring round tinned food, Picture Post, the radio and the combustion engine. It is a civilization in which children grow up with an intimate knowledge of magnetos and in complete ignorance of the Bible. To that civilization belong the people who are most at home in and most definitely of the modern world, the technicians and the higher-paid skilled workers, the airmen and their mechanics, the radio experts, film producers, popular journalists and industrial chemists.’
It was also a world with money to spare. The British economy had begun to haul its way out of the Depression, thanks in part to a consumer-led spending boom. Average real wages were 30 per cent higher in 1938 than in 1931, and between the wars the average working week went down from 55 to 45 hours: there was more money around, and more leisure time in which to spend it. Although poverty and unemployment still blighted rural areas and the old manufacturing regions of the Midlands and the north, in the affluent south people had time and money to spend on holidays, charabanc outings, electrical goods, cars and entertainment; the service industries flourished, and the relative costs of food, clothing, housing, furniture and the humdrum necessities of life steadily declined. Book-buyers, then as now, were a minority sect, drawn mainly from the middle classes: neither Orwell’s tinned-food-eaters nor Priestley’s good-looking factory girls may have seemed natural book-buyers, but if Allen Lane was right in his belief that there was an army of potential readers waiting to be recruited, all of whom shared his own feeling that old-fashioned bookshops were off-putting and intimidating, and their contents far too expensive, then some at least might be found along the arterial roads and in the new industrial estates.
Disposable income and time to spare were not the only factors working in his favour. Orwell noted the spread of middle-class ideas and habits among the working classes, and how ‘the habit of reading has become enormously more widespread. To an increasing extent the rich and the poor read the same books, and they also see the same films and listen to the same radio programmes.’ As the old working class, the labourers and the navvies, were elbowed aside by shop – and office-workers, a ‘general softening of manners’ had taken place, with the result that ‘in tastes, habits, manners and outlook the working class and the middle class are drawing together’. Cyril Connolly and Virginia Woolf would have been appalled to be bracketed with suburban clerks – the Book Society and A. J. Cronin were bad enough – but Orwell was not alone in his sense of a cultural coming together. ‘Notice how the very modern things, like the films and wireless and the sixpenny stores, are absolutely democratic, making no distinction whatsoever between their patrons,’ Priestley wrote in English Journey. The Twenties, the great age of Modernism, had seen a widening of the gulf between the ‘brows’: the arts, like the sciences, were, by their very nature, accessible only to the sensitive, the well educated and the unusually perceptive, and whereas Ulysses, Picasso and Schoenberg could be understood by the highbrows, by Bloomsberries and the enlightened men and women who haunted senior common rooms, the middlebrows had to make do with Hugh Walpole and Louis Golding, and the lowbrows with the cartoon characters Pip, Squeak and Wilfred. The Thirties were more socially conscious, and although social and intellectual snobbery were as sharp and as callous as ever, they were masked or mitigated by a tendency, among the thinking and literary classes, to espouse left-wing causes and proclaim their faith in the Common Man. Seventy years on, Orwell’s and Priestley’s faith in a common culture seems idealistic and almost naïve, but their views would not have seemed absurd between 1939 and 1945, or in the socially optimistic years of the post-war Labour government: Penguin would benefit from, and cater to, this new constituency, and if Lane’s own tastes were instinctively middlebrow, the proliferation, over the years ahead, of Pelicans, Penguin Poets, Penguin New Writing, Penguin Modern Painters and the rest would appeal as much to the highbrow literati as to the Wellsian clerks who so excited their disdain.
In the meantime, of course, the great mass of the population had no strong views on the matter, whatever their class or education. It was, Harold Raymond ruefully remarked, ‘a marked and regrettable characteristic of so many Englishmen of the public school type that they find no pleasure or relaxation in the use of their intellect. “I’m no reader” are words which one often hears uttered without shame or regret.’ ‘Before the war the English on the whole were not a book-buying people,’ Christina Foyle recalled. ‘We in the book trade remember with horror an advertisement that depicted a woman worrying over her small boy. There he is, poring over a book, a pitiable spectacle. “You don’t want your boy to be a bookworm,” ran the caption. “You want him to be a normal healthy boy.” A few doses of Dr So-and-so’s pills averted the tragedy, and you see him in the next picture chasing a football with a happy grin on his little iciot face.’ Leaving aside the caution or hostility of his professional colleagues, Lane had quite a mountain to climb.
When, after Basil Willett’s departure from The Bodley Head, Allen Lane moved his office from Brewer Street to Vigo Street, he took with him Stan Olney, the trade manager, and an office junior named H. A. W. Arnold. Olney was a loyal, likeable, under-nourished-looking character, with heavily Brylcreemed hair swept back from his forehead and thick round horn-rimmed specs that made him look like a leaner version of Arthur Askey. He was essentially a clerk, at home in the world of ledgers and double-entry book-keeping, but – as was the way at The Bodley Head, and in the early years of Penguin – he was expected to turn his hand to anything: he was, for a time, in charge of press advertising, supervising the work of Edward Young, a shy and good-looking young man who had recently graduated from pasting reviews into a scrapbook to designing ads and display material. Arnold was a bookish youth from south London who had joined The Bodley Head at the age of fifteen on wages of 15s. a week, and was now earning twice as much. One day in the summer of 1933 Arnold told Edward Young that he felt convinced there was a market for a series of sixpenny paperbacks, ideally of out-of-copyright classics, undercutting the hardback Everyman’s Library and tailor-made for people like himself, keen readers who could never afford to spend a sizeable slice of their wages on hardback books. Young urged him to talk to the boss about his plans, but since Lane was seldom in the office, and was hard to pin down, some time went by before Arnold could, with due diffidence, raise the matter with him. To his disappointment, Lane showed little interest, though he promised to think about it: Arnold must realize that the firm had done extremely badly with its own series of 9d. paperbacks, that they still owed the printers £9,000 for printing the thirty-odd titles, so adding to the firm’s overdraft, and that his fellow-directors would never lend their support to such a scheme. Lane never subsequently referred to this conversation, but some weeks later Olney handed Arnold two paperbacks, a Tauchnitz and an Albatross: they were to get estimates from printers and papermakers, do their own sums, and work out how many copies they would need to print (and sell) in order to publish at 6d. a volume. Over the next six months, to the disapproval of the old guard, or what remained of it, the two men pored over the figures. Eventually they came up with a calculation which not only turned in a modest profit but, by allowing a farthing a copy royalty, enabled them to publish books that were still in copyright.
After a spell at The Bodley Head’s new trade counter in Galen Place, near the British Museum, Arnold left publishing for the Museum itself: Max Mallowan, knowing of his interest in archaeology, found him a job there, and in due course he became a world authority on some of the lesser-known Oriental languages. We may never know to what extent Lane had been influenced by his suggestion – or, indeed, exactly when he inspected the stock at the Exeter railway bookstall, on his way home from a weekend with the Mallowans – but by the spring of 1934 he must have been pondering the possibility of chancing his arm with sixpenny paperbacks. Later, when Penguins had proved the publishing phenomenon of the decade, if not the century, he explained in articles and interviews what his thoughts had been. ‘From the moment when somebody invented a way of duplicating books from movable types, the mass-produced sixpenny became inevitable,’ he told the Penrose Annual, the bible of the printing trade. The man in the street, accustomed to the penny newspaper, could not understand why books were so expensive: ‘he compared the price of a new novel with, for instance, the number of pints of beer he could get for the same money, and naturally chose beer every time’. Although something of an anti-smoker – Edward Young remembered how, in the early days of Penguin, staff were only allowed to smoke when entertaining visitors – his most famous analogy was with tobacco rather than drink: ‘quite obviously’, he declared, ‘the thing to aim at was the sixpenny book, something that could be bought as easily and as casually as a packet of cigarettes’. His motives were ‘both missionary and mercenary’: it was ‘very important that books should be mass-produced if there is to be any meaning in liberty of opinion, and if knowledge is to be accessible to everyone’, and he resented the notion that ‘the only people who could possibly want a cheap edition must belong to a lower order of intelligence’. Years later he told Woodrow Wyatt that he wanted to make the point that ‘a man who may be poor in money is not necessarily poor in intellectual qualities’, and that far from publishing lurid-looking nonsense, ‘I wanted to make the kind of book which, when the vicar comes to tea, you don’t push under the cushion. You are rather more inclined to put it on the table to show what sort of person you are.’
Like the cigarette packet, the visiting vicar was to become a recurrent if oddly old-fashioned presence in Lane’s interviews with the Press; and so too was his dislike of the frowstier type of bookshop, with its snooty-seeming staff and reverential hush: Penguins, he told the Bookseller, were ‘designed primarily to reach these people, where they congregate on railway stations and in chain stores, with the hope that when they see these books are available in the regular bookshops, they will overcome their temerity and come in’. As for his fellow-publishers, the day of the ‘quiet, “gentlemanly” publisher’ had passed, as had that of ‘the publisher who imagines that the majority of people are stupid, interested only in entertainment that enables them to escape from their environment’. In short, ‘the only conclusion we can come to is that for several years the book trade has been sitting on a gold mine and not known it. It is quite clear that the time has come to wake up to the fact that people want books, that they want good books, and that they are willing, even anxious, to buy them if they are presented to them in a straightforward, intelligent manner at a cheap price.’ At a more practical level, such books would, for the time being at least, be published under The Bodley Head imprint, with the Lanes putting up the money, taking all risks and profits, and paying their old firm a commission for sales, distribution, publicity and other services: to such good effect, as it turned out, that when The Bodley Head went into liquidation, Penguin Books were its largest debtors.
Armed with these thoughts, Lane set out, in September 1934, to attend a conference of publishers and booksellers at Ripon Hall, near Oxford. As Presidents of the Publishers’ and the Booksellers’ Associations, Stanley Unwin and Basil Blackwell had invited forty-eight eminent colleagues, twenty-four from each side, to bemoan rising costs, sluggish sales and reduced profit margins and, or so Blackwell claimed years later, ‘to discuss the new reading public which we felt was just round the corner’. As it turned out, the only person prepared to take up the challenge was Allen Lane. The Canadian publisher and author Rache Lovat Dickson remembered that ‘he combined with a handsome appearance an air of incisiveness, as though he was about to make a great decision’ – and that the assumption that they had all gathered for a genial session of grousing was shattered once he rose to his feet. Lane dared to suggest that there was a new market which, at present, was met by Woolworth’s, the twopenny libraries and the chain stores, and that he intended to tap this market via a line in sixpenny paperbacks. His audience was neither pleased nor impressed. A well-known Glaswegian bookseller said he would have ‘naething’ to do with Lane’s paperbacks, since ‘if we can’t make money at seven and six, how are we going to make it at sixpence?’ but the most vociferous opponent was David Roy, the head of W. H. Smith’s book department. Roy had earlier led book trade opposition to the Book Society, and had more recently worked himself into a frenzy of rage over a scheme, supported by authors but eventually withdrawn in the face of booksellers’ hostility, whereby Kensitas cigarettes offered books in exchange for coupons. According to Frank Morley from Faber, Roy, ‘a large, rugger-playing sort of figure, burly, very red-faced, very angry, proceeded to blast off’: he interrupted Lane’s speech incessantly, reminding Morley of a Spanish galleon trying to see off Sir Francis Drake. Stanley Unwin claimed to remember nothing of Lane’s speech, though he thought the vexed issue of paperbacks might have been discussed informally; Blackwell, on the other hand, recalled how ‘47 of [the delegates] went away on the Monday morning with no further thought on the subject. The 48th was Allen Lane, who told me that the idea of Penguins came to him under an aged apple tree in my garden.’
Despite support from a few of his fellow-delegates, Wren Howard of Cape among them, Lane returned from the Ripon Hall conference ‘flaming mad’ with his fellow-publishers (or so H. A. W. Arnold recalled), and set about putting his Newtonian moment of revelation into practice. This involved deciding what the books should look like, finding a name for the list, and, since it would be a reprint 1 st, approaching other publishers to see if they (and their authors) would be willing to sub-lease him the rights. ‘I have never been able to understand why cheap books should not also be well-designed, for good design is no more expensive than bad,’ he once wrote, and although Penguins only realized their full elegance after the war, when the great Swiss typographer Jan Tschichold was persuaded to join the staff, they were always striking and pleasing on the eye: ‘We aimed at making something pretty smart, a product clean and as bright as two pins, modern enough not to offend the fastidious highbrow, and yet straightforward and unpretentious.’ Like Victor Gollancz, he instinctively disliked picture jackets. ‘I have always thought it one of the worst days in the world for the British book trade when “picture jackets” began to come in,’ stormed the hyperbolical VG: Lane may well have been influenced by the striking yellow, black and magenta lettering jackets that Stanley Morison was designing for Gollancz, who had decided, after exhaustive tests at a London railway bookstall, that yellow jackets were the most noticeable of all. Penguins were, by comparison, a model of sobriety. Edward Young, though never trained as a typographer, designed the famous horizontal bands, using a fashionable Gill Sans Bold for the title’s lettering: Lane, he recalled, wanted ‘a consistent and easily recognizable cover design’ as well as a ‘good trade mark that would be easy to treat pictorially, easy to say, and easy to remember’. The texts themselves were set, initially, in a variety of typefaces, but in 1937 the compact but legible Times New Roman, the typeface which Morison had designed for the remodelling of The Times in 1932, was chosen for the new Penguin Shakespeare series, and it remained the standard Penguin typeface until the arrival of Jan Tschichold. And whereas many publishers bulked out their books to make them look value for money, Lane insisted that his books should fit easily into a pocket or a handbag.
He was anxious to promote Penguin as a brand, to sell the imprint as well as individual books: paperbacks might be, in theory, as disposable as newspapers or cigarettes, but he wanted people to collect Penguins, so that each book helped to sell its companions. Penguins were, he wrote in 1938, ‘the first serious attempt at introducing “branded goods” to the book trade’. Notions of ‘corporate image’, ‘house style’, ‘logos’ and the like were being promoted by up-to-the-minute advertising agencies like Crawford’s, by Frank Pick at London Underground, who imposed a ‘house style’ on the Tube with Edward Johnston’s sans serif lettering, and by that inimitable patron of poets and painters, Jack Beddington at Shell; and Lane was in tune with the times. The Thirties had a passion for design, and if Lane did not consciously subscribe to the Bauhaus notion that well-designed objects – fridges, vacuum cleaners, typewriters, ocean liners, the lettering on the side of a department store – should be works of art, he was moving in that direction.
Equally important was a memorable and, ideally, endearing name-cum-trade mark for the new publishing house. Edward Young recalled how a long morning was devoted to the subject, the participants sitting round a table in a ‘dark little office’ in Vigo Street while Allen Lane’s secretary, Joan Coles, typed busily away on the other side of a partition and, every now and then, ‘elderly and benign Bodley Head gentlemen sauntered in and out with gentle smiles and mutters of “hare-brained schemes” under their breath’. ‘Phoenix’ was considered, suggestive of the new firm rising from the ashes of The Bodley Head, but Chatto already had its Phoenix Library. A dolphin was suggested, redolent of a Renaissance printer’s device and the Bristol coat-of-arms, but failed to find favour. According to Young, they had Albatross’s example in mind – ‘As to the name of the series, who knows whether the Penguin was not subconsciously hatched from an Albatross egg?’ the Penguin typographer Hans Schmoller once wondered – when Joan Coles suddenly piped up from the far side of her partition with ‘What about Penguins?’ Lane liked it at once – it had, he felt, ‘a certain dignified flippancy’ that seemed entirely appropriate – and Young, supplied with funds from petty cash, was sent off to the Zoo in Regent’s Park to sketch a penguin for the covers.
Years later Ethel Mannin recalled how, ‘in the old days, when you had much less money, and I had much more’, and she was ‘young and beautiful, as we all were then’, she met the Lane brothers in a pub in Piccadilly. ‘They had a cardboard model of a penguin, with which they fooled about, waddling it about the table at which we sat; they were laughing, yet deadly serious,’ she wrote in her memoirs. ‘“Our idea was paperbacks at sixpence, and calling them Penguins,” Allen said. I enquired, through a ginny haze, “Why Penguins?” They laughed and remarked “Why not?” To which there was no logical answer…’ Robert Lusty called in at Vigo Street and found Lane ‘quick, alert, emphatic’, and far removed from conventional notions of a ‘revolutionary prophet’. ‘How well I remember our holiday in Spain when you were far gone in Penguin pregnancy, and as dreamy and uncomfortable as any woman in her ninth month,’ the printer Raymond Hazell recalled. His firm produced a dummy and specimen pages for the first ten titles, but the actual printing order would go to a rival firm, the Athenaeum Printing Works in Redhill, whose quote was cheaper ‘by some percentage of a farthing per copy’ – so demonstrating that, when it came to business, ‘shrewdness always counted more than sentiment with Allen Lane’. Sensibly spreading his debts, Lane printed the subsequent batches with Clay’s, Wyman and Purnell, and Hazell’s had to wait until some of the early titles were reprinted before their services were called upon.
‘In choosing these first ten titles,’ Lane told the Bookseller shortly before they appeared, ‘the test I applied to each book was to ask myself: is this a book which, if I had not read it, and had seen it on sale at 6d., would make me say, “This is a book I have always meant to read; I will get it now.”’ That was all very well, but persuading publishers to fall in with his plans was a very different matter. Penguin No. i – André Maurois’s Ariel – was no problem, since The Bodley Head was its hardback publisher; but thereafter he came across fierce resistance. Although Lane always denied that Penguins would cheapen books or reduce hardback sales, on the grounds that the books had long been available anyway and ‘any sales we effect will be extra sales and not at the expense of existing editions’, publishers worried that Penguins would destroy the sale of their cheap editions and ruin their business with the all-important library market. The most eloquent spokesman for the old order was Harold Raymond, a former schoolmaster who had joined Chatto & Windus after the First World War and remained there for the rest of his working life. ‘Your suggestion of the sixpenny series has led to long discussions among us here, but I am sorry to tell you that we have decided not to cooperate,’ he told Lane. Were he to agree to sub-lease titles to Penguin, ‘the sale of the other editions of the other titles in the series [i.e. the 3s. 6d. cheap editions] would suffer very severely’. As he had told Lane on his visit to Chatto, ‘The steady cheapening of books is in my opinion a great danger in the trade at present, and I sometimes think that the booksellers have to be saved from themselves in this respect. It is they who have so constantly clamoured for us publishers to “meet depression with depression prices”. Yet it is this lowering of prices which is one of the chief reasons why our trade is finding it so hard to recover from the slump.’ Raymond returned to the subject in a lecture at Stationers’ Hall three years later, by which time his firm was doing brisk business with Penguin Books. He conceded that Penguins looked good, published worthwhile books and appealed to authors once their hardback sales of the sub-leased books had begun to drop away, but worried whether the book trade can afford to cut its profits to the fine point which a sixpenny novel now involves’. Were Penguins tapping a new market, or would people spend even less on books now that cheap books were so readily available? Booksellers were reporting a falling-off in the sales of hardback cheap editions – so much so that they soon ceased to exist – and he worried that the 7s. 6d. novel, and the still more expensive works of non-fiction, would be seen by the public its a ‘ramp’, and the publishers themselves as gentlemanly wide-boys. High prices, he concluded, were in the interests of publishers, booksellers and authors: whereas a successful author could expect a royalty of 20 per cent or even 25 per cent on a 7s. 6d. hardback, the most he could expect from Penguin was the equivalent of 2 per cent of sixpence, or half a farthing per book.
Nor was Raymond alone in his opposition. Sir Newman Flower at Cassell refused to have any dealings with Penguin, though his son Desmond changed all that when he took over the family firm in 1938; Charles Evans of Heinemann was adamant in his hostility, convinced that Penguin would destroy authors’ livelihoods and do terrible damage to his firm’s profitable cheap editions. When Enid Bagnold begged him to offer her bestselling novel National Velvet to Penguin, he refused even to consider the idea. Heinemann had sold 19,655 copies of the 7s. 6d. edition alone, and for him to sub-lease the rights to Penguin would ruin sales of the cheap edition. ‘It is best for everybody’s sake to get the last drop of milk out of the coconut,’ the avuncular publisher told her. Eighteen months later she returned to the attack, but was once again beaten off. ‘It is my considered view, based on facts, figures and experience, that the sales of Penguins have done more harm to publishing and authors than any movement for a great many years. There are many booksellers who would tell you that since the demand for Penguins they can sell practically nothing else,’ he warned her. ‘Nobody can live off sixpenny books. Nobody makes any money out of them except the Penguin publishers and possibly their printers.’ Penguin, he went on, were making their profits ‘at the expense of writers and other publishers’, and ‘in the long run, all authors who have given encouragement to the Penguin series are helping to cut their own throats’. Defeated but unconvinced, Enid Bagnold made one last plea for mercy. ‘National Velvet is now dead,’ she told her unbending publisher. ‘Dead as mutton. But it could have this huge second life, and I feel desperate when I think that I can’t have it, and National Velvet can’t have it. That it is shut away in a 7s. 6d. coffin, decent, rich, with brass handles, and it might have sixpenny wings. National Velvet is like a child who is eating his heart out to go on the music halls.’
But not all authors shared her passion for paperbacks. Writing in the New English Weekly, George Orwell pronounced Penguins
splendid value for sixpence, so splendid that if the other publishers had any sense they would combine against them and suppress them. It is, of course, a great mistake to imagine that cheap books are good for the book trade. Actually it is just the other way about. If you have, for instance, five shillings to spend and the normal price of a book is half-a-crown, you are quite likely to spend your whole five shillings on two books. But if books are sixpence each you are not going to buy ten of them, because you don’t want as many as ten; your saturation point will have been reached long before that. Probably you will buy three sixpenny books and spend the rest of your five shillings on seats at the ‘movies’. Hence the cheaper books become, the less money is spent on books. This is an advantage from the reader’s point of view and doesn’t hurt trade as a whole, but for the publisher, the compositor, the author and the bookseller it is a disaster.
Harold Raymond and Charles Evans could hardly have hoped for a more eloquent advocate.
Both Stanley Unwin and Victor Gollancz were determinedly unhelpful. Unwin was generally thought to know more about publishing than any man alive, and was determined to prove that cheap paperbacks were doomed to failure: Lane liked to imagine him scurrying round the bookshops, peering at the Penguins through his pince-nez and scribbling costs and calculations in his notebook. Unwin was convinced that only a limited number of books could justify, in sales terms, the long print-runs needed to publish at 6d., and that Penguins would die of inanition in due course. He also predicted that rising costs of printing and paper would erode Lane’s wafer-thin profit margins, making it impossible for him to continue in business, or stick to the terms of his agreement to publish at sixpence: but although Lane would always remain wedded to the lotion of cheap books, he would, in due course, reluctantly put up the prices of his books to allow for rising costs, knowing perfectly well that Penguins were, by then, too well established to lose their market.
Whereas Unwin’s reaction was cool and analytical, Gollancz’s was that of a sulky child who resents a newcomer hogging the limelight and succeeding where he had earlier failed. He refused to reply to Lane’s standard letter about the possibility of his acquiring the rights in particular Gollancz titles: in the end – or so it was said – Lane sent him a pre-paid postcard reading, ‘I shall be happy to negotiate/I am sorry but I cannot consider leasing to Penguins the following titles… Please delete whichever phrase is inappropriate’, only to have it returned ‘with everything struck out up to and including the words “I am sorry”’. Lane was able to take some kind of revenge by including in his first batch a novel by Dorothy Sayers, an author about whom Gollancz was particularly possessive: he persuaded Benn to release The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club, in which they still controlled the rights, and honour was satisfied. Gollancz refused to have any dealings with Penguin until the 1950s, when he wrote to ‘my dear Allen’ to ask whether Penguin could be persuaded to paperback one of his own books, A Year of Grace (‘It is said to be the most successful anthology of its kind since Robert Bridges’s Testament of Man,’ he assured his old enemy, who was duly persuaded). The two men had much in common, as it happened: neither had any time for trade organizations like the Publishers’ Association (‘I refuse to be manacled by fools!’ VG once shouted); both paid below-average wages to their employees but would indulge in sudden acts of generosity; like Jonathan Cape in Bedford Square, both combined courage and ruthlessness in their business dealings with moral cowardice, sacking people on an impulse but leaving it to others to execute their orders. But their temperaments could hardly have been more different. The novelist Norman Collins, a director of Gollancz in the Thirties, remembered how ‘Victor exuded a greater dynamism than any man I’ve ever known. Even to see him coming through the front door was like a tempest coming in. He sat down in a chair; the chair creaked. I remember going in to see him one day. He was sharpening a pencil; it was like any lesser man hewing down an oak tree.’ VG was emotional, impulsive, shambolic in appearance and given to roaring and pounding the table in a rage; AL – as Lane’s Penguin employees soon came to call him – was cool, reserved and dapper, and when he was angry he never raised his voice but his lips thinned and his bright blue eyes turned to slivers of ice.
One publisher was prepared to give Lane the benefit of the doubt; and where he led, others would follow. A well-dressed, hard-headed countryman who had begun as an errand boy at Hatchard’s before working for Gerald Duckworth, Jonathan Cape was, according to his former employee Rupert Hart-Davis, ‘one of the tightest-fisted old bastards I’ve ever encountered’. ‘A publisher of outstanding genius with the heart of a horse-coper’ in Eric Linklater’s opinion, he had started his own firm in 1921, and before long it was widely agreed to be the most stylish and fashionable publisher in London, admired for the elegance of its production, masterminded by Cape’s partner, Wren Howard, and for a literary list that was second to none. Lane was determined to win them round, and paid a visit to No. 30 Bedford Square. ‘I went to see Jonathan and said: “I want 10 to start and 10 to follow, and I want 10 of them from yours.”’ He told Cape which titles he was after, and offered him an advance on each of
£25, payable on publication, against a royalty of a farthing a copy. Cape replied that he would accept advances of £40, payable on signature of the contract, against royalties of three-eighths of a penny, and the deal was done. Years later, Lane recalled,
I was talking to Jonathan and he said, ‘You’re the b… that has ruined this trade with your ruddy Penguins.’ I replied, ‘Well, I wouldn’t have got off to such a good start if you hadn’t helped me.’ He said, ‘I know damn well you wouldn’t, but like everybody else in the trade I thought you were bound to go bust, and I thought I’d take 400 quid off you before you did.’
Cape provided six of the first ten titles, Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, Eric Linklater’s Poet’s Pub, Susan Ertz’s unmemorable Madame Claire, Beverley Nichols’s Twenty-five, E. H. Young’s William and Gone to Earth by Mary Webb, an author much admired and publicly acclaimed by the Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin; The Bodley Head provided Ariel and Agatha Christie’s The Mysterious Affair at Styles; Compton Mackenzie’s Carnival came from Chatto, now reluctantly eating their words, and the Dorothy Sayers concluded the opening salvo. (According to Steve Hare, the Penguin historian, the famous first batch of ten was, in fact, eleven: Agatha Christie’s The Mysterious Affair at Styles was, thanks to a contractual misunderstanding, included in the opening ten, but was immediately withdrawn and replaced with her Murder on the Links. Both books remained on the Penguin list.)
Persuading booksellers to stock them was to prove quite as daunting a task as winning round the publishers. While John Lane put his new-found knowledge of overseas markets to miraculous effect – he simply wrote to the booksellers and wholesalers he had met on his world tour to tell them how many copies he would be sending, and later wished he’d been even bolder in the quantities recommended – Dick and Allen devoted the early summer of 1935 to the dispiriting task of trying to win round booksellers in the home market. Dick concentrated on London and the suburbs; Allen visited bookshops in England and Scotland, and since he liked to involve his family whenever possible, he took his mother along for the ride. Neither of them can have been cheered by the trade’s reactions. Many booksellers refused to allow Penguins into their shops or, if they condescended to place an order, confined the offending items to a bin on the pavement outside. They complained that the profit margin on sixpence was too small to be worth bothering with, that such small books would fall prey to shoplifters, that they would soon look grubby and tatty, that the dust-jackets worn by the early Penguins would be torn by the public, that they would ‘simply add to the bad stock with which every bookshop was already unpleasantly full’. ‘Who’s ever heard of Pooet’s Poob?’ grumbled a Manchester bookseller on being shown a dummy of Eric Linklater’s novel. Selfridge’s had reserved a window, and the famous J. G. Wilson of Bumpus in Oxford Street had promised his support, but Lane was so dispirited that he almost abandoned hope. ‘Its a flop. Nobody will want them. I’ve got to pack it up. Do you know anyone who would take the whole thing off my hands?’ he asked Llywelyn Maddock after learning that neither W. H. Smith nor Simpkin Marshall had shown any interest. ‘Poor Allen was knocked for six – the only time in my life when I have seen him really down,’ Maddock recalled. Lane had printed 20,000 each of the ten titles, 10,000 of which had been bound: each copy had cost twopence-halfpenny to manufacture, the gross margin was a penny a copy, and they would break even when sales reached between 17,000 and 18,000 per title. So far they had subscribed a miserable 7,000 each, and the future looked grim indeed.
Then, quite suddenly, everything changed. According to publishing folklore, three weeks before publication, on a Saturday, a despondent Lane called at Woolworth’s head office. Although Clifford Prescott was the buyer for the haberdashery department, books formed part of his empire, and Lane had got to know him when he sold him The Three Little Pigs. Most of the books sold in Woolworth’s were at the lower end of the market – Collins did brisk business with them, and they produced their own Readers’ Library – and Prescott took a dim view of the Penguins. ‘I don’t know about these, with no pictures on the front. Readers’ Library is better value,’ he told Lane, and his assistant was equally unenthusiastic. Just then Mrs Prescott arrived, fresh from shopping and eager for lunch. She recognized, and approved of, several titles on the Penguin list, and (or so it was said) had a soft spot for their handsome young publisher. ‘I think they’re very good too, we’ll give them a trial,’ said Mr Prescott, suddenly converted. He told Lane that he would take a consignment order; back in the office, Lane rang Sydney Goldsack, the sales manager of Collins, to find out what was meant by a consignment order, and was told that every branch of Woolworth’s would have Penguins on sale, but that if he failed to meet the order in full by the agreed date he could lose it in toto. A day or two later an order for 63,500 copies came through; other shops followed suit, and Penguin’s future was assured. Not all of this quite rings true: cynics have suggested that Lane set up the meeting with Prescott far earlier than he later claimed, and engineered the entire episode so as to extract maximum publicity and create a surge of last-minute orders; nor does it seem credible that so experienced a salesman as Lane would have been ignorant about consignment orders.
The first ten Penguins were published on the Tuesday before the August Bank Holiday of 1935. On the Friday Lane jumped off a bus outside Selfridge’s on his way to work, and was told by the book-buyer there that the initial 100 copies of each title had almost sold out, and he needed another 1,000 at once. Back in the office, the phone was ringing with booksellers demanding copies. Penguins had arrived in strength, and were already confounding their critics.
