The Times Literary Supplement may have ignored the first batch of Penguins, but, for the most part, reactions in the Press and from private individuals echoed the enthusiasm of the book-buying public. ‘These Penguin Books are amazingly good value for money. If you can make the series pay for itself – with such books at such a price – you will have performed a great publishing feat.’ J. B. Priestley told Lane. ‘Let me congratulate you greatly on your Penguin Books, perfect marvels of beauty and cheapness. You have nipped in at just the proper time for getting them floated, for they are the ideal books for holiday-makers,’ wrote Mr Bulloch of Allied Newspapers.
Nowadays it is hard to imagine a publishing house hitting the headlines, let alone a brave new venture, but things were very different in an age when television was in its infancy, the printed word prevailed, and Victor Gollancz was a figure of national importance. ‘A PUBLISHING TRIUMPH,’ blared the Sunday Referee, hardly the most highbrow of papers. ‘Not since the halcyon days of the pre-war period has so courageous a venture been launched,’ the paper’s correspondent declared. ‘I don’t know how it is done. For apart from the fact that every title is in copyright – and authors have to live – the production is magnificent: strong, limp binding, good paper, clear type, and even a dust-jacket. The venture is bound to succeed. The courage behind it is as admirable as the volumes. The publishers have placed the reading public under a debt of gratitude.’ Howard Spring, an influential middlebrow novelist and literary panjandrum, voiced his approval; at a higher-brow level, Herbert Read decreed that the disposable Penguin ‘makes literature as fluid a commodity as cigarettes or chocolate, a thought which would have horrified a Ruskin or a Morris’ – so partly missing the point, since one of the more obvious manifestations of Penguin fever was that people kept (and sometimes collected) them in exactly the same way as conventional hardback books. The Observer thought the new list made ‘perfect reading for sixpence a time, in the jolliest coloured paper bindings. Perfect for seashore, wood, moorland and even the train or aeroplane’, and forecast that ‘every suitcase in the family’ would soon be ‘bursting with treasure’. The Saturday Review declared them ideal for being ‘carried in a man’s pocket or a lady’s handbag’; the Bookseller reported a week after the launch that 150,000 copies had been sold in four days, and that ‘one of the great Continental air transport companies’ was thinking of giving free copies to their passengers. James Agate in the Daily Express confirmed the fears of those publishers who worried that Penguins would disrupt the delicate ecology of their business. Under the heading ‘7/6 is too much for a novel: the new sixpenny ones prove it’, he suggested that the book trade was ‘in my considered view the biggest ramp in the country… Publishers are the door-keepers and valets of men of letters, and were I in charge of the next revolution I should give every publisher of my acquaintance a choice between the sixpenny novel and the lamppost!’
Influential as he was, Agate was in no position to match rhetoric with action; but publishers are an imitative breed, and in no time Lane’s rivals were following his example. The Evening Standard reported that Hutchinson, the veteran paperback publishers, had started a sixpenny list of Toucan Books, while Collins introduced its White Circle list of thrillers, with Peter Cheyney its star author. If Penguin’s success was anything to go by, they were well advised to follow Lane’s example. The second batch of Penguins had included Norman Douglas’s South Wind, Samuel Butler’s Erewhon, Liam O’Flaherty’s The Informer, Dashiell Hammett’s The Thin Man and W. H. Hudson’s The Purple Land, and others followed in a steady stream: in January 1936 the Evening Standard informed its readers that a million Penguins had been sold in the first four months after publication. The business made a net profit of £4,500 in its first nine months’ trading, and by July 1936 over 3 million books had been sold: a Penguin was being bought every ten seconds, the firm boasted in a Bookseller advertisement, and ‘placed end-to-end they would reach from London to Cologne’.
Some of the profits were siphoned off for the ailing Bodley Head: Lane still nourished vain hopes of buying the firm for £10,000 after a receiver had been appointed, and using it as a ‘feeder’ for Penguin titles, but the umbilical cord linking Penguin with its parent firm was finally severed shortly after the entire staff of Penguin had celebrated their first Christmas together with dinner at Talbot Square, followed by a visit to the Metropolitan music-hall in the Edgware Road. Fearful that his new enterprise could be dragged under by an insolvent parent, Lane arranged for Penguin Books Ltd to be incorporated on 1 January 1936. The three brothers were its directors: Dick had recently claimed from his insurers after losing various items during a burglary at their parents’ house in Fal field, so he put up the initial capital of £100; and the deeds of the parental home were lodged with the bank as collateral. A £7,000 overdraft at the Cocks Biddulph branch of Martins Bank enabled them to keep afloat, and would become a permanent feature of Penguin life for the next quarter of a century; and despite the bad debts at The Bodley Head, printers and other suppliers were prepared to give Lane extended credit. Dick took to visiting the bank once a fort-night with a copy of that day’s Times tucked under his arm; he knew that the two managers liked to do the crossword every morning after opening the post, and, eager to keep in their good books, and to give ‘an air of friendliness’ to the proceedings, Dick made a point of opening each discussion with ‘Have you got one across yet?’
Before long, other publishers were following where Cape had led. Harold Macmillan of the family firm may have refused to consider an offer for the paperback rights in Hardy’s novels, but Harold Raymond at Chatto was proving more emollient than expected. Two months after the launching of Penguins, he wrote to Lane to say that he had discussed the matter with his partners, and ‘though our general feeling still is that the Book Trade as a whole may come to rue the day of the advent of this particular line of publication, we are quite willing to approach some of our authors and invite them to join in our venture. Although I shall not beg them to accept, I shall certainly not do the reverse.’ A few days later Raymond was in touch with T. F. Powys about the possibility of Penguin publishing Mr Weston’s Good Wine. ‘Chattos have been rather coy about their blandishments from a general feeling that there is a danger of books becoming too cheap,’ he told his author. ‘However, the series has been very successfully launched and the Lanes are in a position to offer terms that are distinctively attractive’ – and, he could have added, better than those being offered to other publishers, consisting as they did of an advance of £100 per title against 30s. per 1,000 copies sold for a five-year exclusive licence. All the same, ‘I cannot help feeling that the day may come when the book trade as a whole may regret these very cheap books, and that authors and publishers may find it increasingly hard to scratch a living. I think it would pay you to take advantage of the proposal, for it would take a long while for Mr Weston to earn £50 from our Phoenix Library.’ Chatto, as the hardback publisher, would be keeping 50 per cent of the Penguin advance and royalties: hence the reference to £50.*
Writing to the Hogarth Press about his new series, Lane assured Leonard Woolf that ‘one of the interesting features has been the way in which it has not affected adversely the sales of more expensive books’. Cape had already licensed five titles from their Florin Library – priced, inconsequentially, at 2s. 6d. apiece – and had received no complaints about cheap editions becoming unsaleable in the face of sixpenny Penguins: ‘in fact we have definitely been able to trace sales of more expensive editions of books by the same author directly to sales of Penguin Books.’ (Such optimism was premature: by the time war broke out, sales of hardback cheap editions had been virtually annihilated.) Lane offered an advance of £40 for Vita Sackville-West’s The Edwardians; despite all the publicity, the author had never heard of Penguin Books, but since ‘it sounds rather a paying proposition’ she was all for going ahead. By September 1936 her novel had sold 64,349 copies in paperback, earning her £56 10s. 5d in royalties over and above her original advance; another 23,885 had been sold by the following spring, and the same rate of sale was sustained in the next two half-yearly statements. In October 1939 Lane asked if he could reduce the royalty from 30s. per 1,000 to £1 per 1,000, and Woolf urged his author not to accept. ‘I cannot see why you should be expected to subsidize the Lanes,’ he told her. ‘I think it wrong in principle to agree,’ she wrote back. ‘It is spoiling the market for other people who may be absolutely dependent upon their earnings.’ On the other hand, being published in Penguin ‘does provide a good advertisement for an author from which you as my publisher naturally benefit’, so perhaps they should agree to 25s. per 1,000? But Woolf would have none of it. He had refused to accept a reduced royalty, and had made no mention of a compromise ‘as it seems to me to give away the principle and I really think the whole thing is a try-on on the part of Penguins’.
Try-on or not, the shrewd and parsimonious Woolf was prepared to deal further with the Lanes, discussing terms for the ‘sixpenny rights’ in C. H. B. Kitchen’s Death of My Aunt and doing battle with Dick over the farthing royalty proposed for Vita Sackville-West’s All Passion Spent; but Stanley Unwin remained unconvinced. Three years after the launching of Penguins, and a year after the appearance of the non-fiction Pelican list, he was still on the warpath. Writing in the Times Literary Supplement under the heading ‘Concerning Sixpennies’, he affected the world-weary note of the sage who has seen it all before and knows it is doomed to failure. There was nothing new about sixpennies, he claimed: in August 1914, publishers’ warehouses had been crammed with the wretched things after the initial flurry of sales had been followed by the inevitable slump when the novelty wore off. ‘As a member of the public I appreciate them,’ he assured his readers, gritting his teeth the while; but in publishing terms they couldn’t and didn’t make sense. Mass production techniques could be applied to a limited number of items, and only a modest quantity of bestselling books would sell well enough to justify the 50,000 print-runs needed to price them at 6d. each; a farthing per copy on sales of 50,000 would earn an author a mere £50, a sum made in no time via a 15 per cent royalty on a 7s. 6d. hardback. He quoted Ruskin’s insistence that ‘a book is not worth anything unless it is worth much’, and a recent essay in which J. M. Keynes blamed a benighted public for ‘their wrong psychology towards book-buying, their mean and tricky ways where a book, the noblest of man’s works, is concerned’.
Years later Sir Stanley’s nephew, Philip Unwin, pointed out that his uncle had been disingenuous in comparing Penguins with the paperbacks of 1914, which had consisted of works by the likes of Ethel M. Dell, printed on newsprint in tiny type in double columns; but a more immediate champion was to hand in the form of Margaret Cole, a keen Fabian whose husband, G. D. H. Cole, would be commissioned to write Practical Economics for the opening batch of Pelican Books. Said by some to have a soft spot for their debonair young publisher, Mrs Cole had already enthused at length about Penguins and other paperbacks in the Listener, noting how they had changed the perception of the book ‘from something that was only suitable to members of an upper or educated class to something which anybody may enjoy or possess without being thought odd, highbrow or “apeing one’s betters’”, and citing the sales by Collins of 3 million White Circle thrillers within three months as further evidence that ‘we are now only at the beginning of a stage in the democratization of books’. Spurred into print by Stanley Unwin’s article, she hurried to put the other side of the story to TLS readers. Penguins, like the Readers’ Union book club and Gollancz’s Left Book Club, had created new readers. Book-buying, she declared, was blighted by poverty and snobbery, and ‘if books are to be purchased by the poor, or the middling poor, they must be as cheap as cigarettes’. Until recently, publishing for the lower orders had been regarded as ‘either a piece of philanthropy or a patent medicine racket’, in which trash was served up in a suitably hideous guise. ‘It is high time that book-owning should cease to be the preserve of a small class,’ she concluded: by ‘giving them the best you can, not either by playing down to them or lecturing them on their “duty” to uphold literature’, Lane had discovered a new market of the hitherto disenfranchised. Unconvinced, as yet, by her passionate defence, the TLS sided with the old order: a leader writer worried that sixpennies were ‘debauching’ buyers of contemporary literature, who would be tempted to wait for the paperback rather than invest in the hardback, that they encouraged the notion that mainstream publishing was, as James Agate had suggested, a ‘ramp’, and that they owed their success to ‘the action of a few very rich authors or very determined propagandists’, but consoled himself with the knowledge that they were ‘already sowing the seeds of their own destruction’. The Economist, on the other hand, declared that ‘to bring serious, well-printed books and genuine literature to homes where ephemeral trash has been the staple diet has been a notable step’.
In the meantime, Lane shocked his more conservative colleagues by installing a ‘Penguincubator’, a slot-machine book-dispenser, in the Charing Cross Road, and by inserting business reply cards in some of his books, asking readers for suggestions and putting them on a mailing list: given the initially lukewarm response from conventional booksellers, he was, for many years, an enthusiastic advocate of selling directly to his readers – a practice abominated by the Booksellers’ Association – and only closed down his direct mail service when it proved too expensive to sustain. The warehouse in which he stored and despatched his books was equally unconventional. The earliest Penguins, those published under the umbrella of The Bodley Head, had been warehoused all over London, but now they were brought under one roof. Designed by Sir John Soane, the architect of the Bank of England, and completed in 1828, Holy Trinity, Marylebone, is a Greek Revival church on the Euston Road. Its crypt was lying empty, so Lane rented it as a warehouse, paying the Church Commissioners a rent of £150 per annum. A dank and gloomy spot, it was reached by a metal spiral staircase. The walls were plastered with plaques commemorating long-dead parishioners, and it suffered sporadic infestations of mice, the whiff of which was known to linger in the pages of the books. Two empty tombs were fitted with metal doors; one was used for petty cash, while the other held the invoice books. The light filtered in through shallow windows high up on the walls; the grille was removed from one of these and replaced with a set of folding doors opening on to a chute, down which new deliveries were hurled from the churchyard above. Wrapped in brown paper parcels, the books were stacked all round the walls, waiting to be despatched to booksellers all over the world, making their escape by means of an ancient lift, formerly used to convey the coffins of the recently deceased, many of them retired civil servants from the West Indian island of St Lucia. Paraffin stoves provided a modicum of warmth in winter. A tin bucket served as a communal lavatory, and at the end of the day it was emptied on to the flagstones of the churchyard; each employee was provided with a penny a day in case they needed to use the public lavatories on the other side of the Euston Road, adjacent to Great Portland Street tube station.
Allen Lane always liked to embellish the past with a patina of myth, and the crypt loomed largest of all in Penguin mythology. H. A. W. Arnold, by now happily ensconced at the British Museum, visited Stan Olney ‘all among the skeletons’: the crypt was, he decided, ‘a grim place. There were moaning sounds from running water, that kind of thing.’ It was rumoured that Bill Rapley, a devout Catholic given to profanities, had fallen through a coffin and found himself embracing a skeleton, and that a member of staff – Rapley, perhaps – hammered his thumb while nailing up a crate of books and let out a terrible oath, interrupting a wedding service in the church above at a critical moment in the proceedings. Edward Young noted the nude pin-ups taped to the walls, and how ‘they had to have a curtain which they could drop at a moment’s notice because the vicar used to come and see how the dear boys were getting on downstairs’. Survivors of the crypt acquired an almost heroic status, and many went on to devote their working lives to the firm: in addition to Olney and Rapley, they included Bob Maynard, recently arrived from Chatto, the muscular Peter Kite, Jack Summers, the sixteen-year-old Bob Davies and, briefly, the piratical travel writer Eric Muspratt, two of whose books appeared in Penguin. For Muspratt, Penguin ‘represented an ideal in the business of publishing, of giving good books to the world at only sixpence each. There was a Soviet touch in this, and Allen Lane had a true touch of the Napoleonic’ The work was long and exhausting: Lane himself often helped pack and invoice books, and on one occasion Dick and John worked for forty-eight hours without sleep. When involved in such marathon sessions, the two younger brothers, having worked all night, would breakfast in a nearby Lyons Corner House, return to Talbot Square for a bath and a shave, row on the Lake in Regent’s Park, and then head back to work. Lane took to visiting Champney’s health farm near Tring for restorative sessions: famed for its regime of orange juice, steam and colonic irrigation, its literary clientele included Hugh Walpole and Cyril Connolly, whose recurrent visits excited the unkind derision of Evelyn Waugh. In later years, when the trousering of his impeccable dove-grey double-breasted suits began to strain at the leash, Lane would book himself in for a session of citrus fruit and salads, returning home slimmer but more fractious than usual.
When not helping out in the crypt, he was busy in a new office on the other side of the Euston Road. Joan Coles had noticed how, towards the end of his time at The Bodley Head, he spent little time in the office and was even harder to pin down than usual: was he, she wondered, trying to dodge persistent creditors brandishing unpaid invoices? Now, with Vigo Street no longer at his disposal, and the creditors off his back, he had taken a couple of rooms above a car showroom in Great Portland Street, over the road from the unofficial office lavatories. A journalist from a trade paper was struck by his lack of self-importance and his nervous energy – he paced up and down his tiny office, seemingly incapable of sitting still – and how very different his was from a conventional publisher’s office: there were no pictures on the wall, the furniture consisted of a small desk and two upright chairs, the phone rang incessantly, and in the room next door, in charge of production, sat the ‘square-jawed, tallish, modest Edward Young, who seems much too young to tackle such big problems’. Jean Osborne, who went there as a secretary, soon found that she ‘was in love with all the Lanes, and Edward Young too’; but Allen made her feel gauche and ‘seemed to take a delight in scrutinizing me at close range’, so much so that ‘I began to think I must smell or look quaint or dowdy’. She came to rather distrust him: he was often kind, but then ‘spoiled his actions by being quite heartless’. John, on the other hand, she liked unreservedly. ‘I felt he was less complex and could cope better with his humour and “ways”’: he was ‘usually so twinkly’, and she liked the way he strutted about the office in his light grey ‘peacock suit’. Bob Davies, who went on to make his career in the sales side, specializing in the European market, found John a kindly and helpful mentor, and was duly grateful when he covered up for him after he had given a retailer a wholesaler’s discount, a cardinal sin in the founder’s book. Others found John an angular, difficult character; all seem to agree that he was the ‘brainy’ brother. Morpurgo suggests, without citing his sources, that John and his eldest brother became increasingly scratchy and competitive with one another; whereas the cautious, benign and stolid Dick, however irritating he may have been, in no way posed a threat. Dick, in Jean Osborne’s opinion, ‘was a dear, and even then I could sense that he was something of an outsider in the trio’.
‘Of one thing I’m sure; there’s no money in it for anybody,’ Lane had told his close friend Edmund Segrave, the editor of the Bookseller, shortly before he launched his list, and elsewhere he wrote that ‘there is no fortune in this series for anyone concerned’. Penguins would, in due course, make him a millionaire, and by the end of the Thirties he was already a very rich man; but in the early days money was in short supply, and although he paid himself £1,000 a year – a handsome wage in those days – both Dick and John worked for nothing for the first two years, and Jean Osborne remembered how the brothers used to cadge 9d. off each other for a haircut. But Lane would always combine modest pay with extraordinary acts of generosity and kindness, usually performed on the sly and a matter of some embarrassment to him: years later, when he learned that Bob Maynard’s wife had been ill during her pregnancy, he found out who was the best gynaecologist in London and booked her into University College Hospital to give birth, and others benefited from his covert good deeds. Before long the success of Penguins enabled him to lash out, for himself and for his staff. His own salary increased by leaps and bounds – in October 1937 the Star, one of London’s three evening papers, ran a large feature on Penguin’s ‘£10,000 a year employer, five feet six or so, sturdy in build, intelligent and commanding in face, quick in thought and decision’ – but he partly compensated for miserly wages by passing his staff 10 per cent of the profits every six months. ‘I wouldn’t dream of running a business any other way,’ he told Rover World, ‘because it makes for the maximum efficiency in every department. The staff themselves see that every individual pulls his weight, and that makes expensive supervision unnecessary.’ Very much in advance of its time, his profit-sharing scheme was soon abandoned: during the war all members of staff were paid a regular bonus based on profits, but this was discontinued in the austere post-war era. Of more immediate interest were staff outings to France. In Boulogne, the Bookseller reported, ‘even the King Penguin behaved in a manner incompatible with his usual austere dignity’ as the alcohol flowed; for the day trip to Dieppe staff members were each provided with A cardboard disc carrying the Penguin colophon and worn round the neck on a string, and one over-charged member of staff, eagerly examining the girls lined up in a brothel for his inspection, noted that one of them was clad in nothing save high-heeled shoes and a Penguin disc round her neck.
Life was not all work, but it seemed impossible to keep the Penguins at bay. Lane took his parents on a cruise to Portugal in September 1937, and on his birthday they asked the Dutch steward if he could produce a penguin-shaped pudding, but were presented instead with a stork; and when, a year earlier, he decided to buy himself a boat, it was named, inevitably, the Penguin. Some years earlier Lane had got to know Norman Clackson, then employed on Yachting Monthly, and he turned to him for advice They tracked down a nine-ton yacht on the Crouch, had her refitted, and arranged for Eric Muspratt to sail her round to Fowey in Cornwall. Dick far preferred fishing to sailing, but Allen and John spent long weekends sailing near Fowey or on the Beaulieu River in Hampshire. He kept the Penguin till the early 1950s, and his interest in the subject took profitable shape in Peter Heaton’s Pelican on Sailing, which was taken on after the war and, despite Clackson’s prediction that it would sell, at most, 15,000 copies, went on to notch up sales of over 350,000.
The Times Literary Supplement may have had its reservations about paperbacks, but its parent paper had noted ‘the emergence of a new social habit on a large scale’; and Lane widened the scope of that social habit when, in August 1936, Bernard Shaw urged him to reissue in paperback Apsley Cherry-Garrard’s classic of Antarctic exploration, The Worst Journey in the World. Lane dutifully took up the suggestion, but in his letter of thanks he told Shaw that what he really wanted was to reissue The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism, Capitalism and Sovietism, published by Constable in 1928. To his amazement, Shaw leapt at the idea. ‘Right, how much do you want to pay for it?’ he asked – a reaction which, Lane told the News Chronicle, ‘rather knocked us’. Nor was that all: Shaw was keen to add two new chapters to his book, and asked that the word Fascism should be added to the title. ‘Prepare for a shock,’ he told the printer William Maxwell. ‘The Penguin Press wants the Intelligent Woman’s Guide. A sixpenny edition would be the salvation of mankind.’ Shaw liked Lane’s businesslike approach and lack of pretension, and Penguins provided the perfect answer to his yearning to see his work in cheap editions. ‘If a book is any good, the cheaper the better,’ he told Penguins Progress, the magazine which kept Penguin readers informed about forthcoming books and their authors. ‘I should have all my books priced at sixpence or less if there had been bookshops enough in these islands to make such a price remunerative.’ He welcomed ‘the great enterprise with open arms. Thanks to them I am becoming almost a known author now that I am between eighty and ninety.’
The Penguin list had always included non-fiction, but Shaw’s book was to form the opening title of a new list. Shortly after he had acquired the rights, Lane was standing by the bookstall at King’s Cross station when he overheard a woman asking for ‘one of those Pelican books’. Presumably she meant a Penguin, but with Toucan Books and Bluebird Books already caged in the paperback aviary, Lane worried that a rival might snap up pelicans as well. Back in the office, he rang his solicitors, Rubinstein, Nash, and was told that he could only claim exclusivity in the name by using it. ‘You can’t protect the word, it’s an existing object,’ Harold Rubinstein told his client. ‘Publish quick, if you’re going to, and we can get them [‘them’ being any rival firm anxious to use the name] for passing off.’ Pelican Books were inaugurated forthwith, appearing in the familiar Penguin horizontal livery but with pale blue replacing the fictional orange, and a line drawing of a pelican standing in for Edward Young’s penguin. H. G. Wells’s A Short History of the World, already available in Penguin, was immediately transferred to the new list. Both Wells and Shaw were to prove keen supporters of Pelican Books, and their combination of accessibility, clear and forceful prose, and leftwards-leaning politics, far closer in spirit to the pragmatists of the Fabian Society than to the ideologues of the far Left, was to infuse and inform the Pelican list. Bearing in mind their age and eminence, Lane was in awe of both men. He took tea but no liberties with Shaw, who deluged him with his comical postcards; he approached Wells with ‘some misgivings’, knowing of his reputation as an author who switched publishers as carelessly as he changed his shirts, but found him entirely benign – ‘perhaps because we both had the same birthday’ – and Wells, for his part, recommended books and authors, and later described Lane as ‘one of the greatest educationalists alive’.
In a letter to Cecil Franklin of Routledge, dictated in August 1936 and typed on old Bodley Head notepaper, Lane said that he was starting a new series called Pelicans, ‘which are to be similar to Penguins only a little more serious in tone’. He was on the hunt for new titles, and was determined that his new list should ‘become the true everyman’s library of the twentieth century, covering a whole range of the Arts and Sciences, and bringing the finest products of modern thought and art to the people’: but who, apart from Lane himself, thought up the idea of Pelican Books was the subject of rival claims. ‘Bookish Krishna Menon’s dark eyes were wide open for new developments in the publishing world, and he took due notice of the Penguins’ progress. Also he had an idea, which he hastened to bring to the attention of the enterprising Lanes. The idea was even more enterprising: to move heavily into the non-fiction field, and to publish not only reprints, but also original works by big names,’ wrote a supporter of one of the two contenders; W. E. Williams, in the opposite corner, claimed that ‘When I first met Allen I suggested that Penguins might join the current crusade by starting a parallel series of cheap books on a wide range of intellectual interests – philosophy, psychology, history, literature, science. He responded immediately and enthusiastically, and I went off to put the idea on paper…’ Writing to Williams during the war, Lane referred to how ‘when you and I first discussed the Pelican idea my eyes were immediately opened to an exciting new possibility’, and how ‘it all began in that quiet little back-room of yours in 29, Tavistock Square’, but it seems most probable that Lane himself had the idea, and used both men to put it into effect. Like all good publishers, he was nimble at exploiting the gifts of others, and in particular of those better educated and more literate than himself; and they were happy to claim credit for themselves, and to patronize him as a shrewd but ignorant businessman, ill-at-ease in the world of writers and thinkers. Since Krishna Menon was described as the ‘General Editor’ of the series on the title page of the first thirty Pelicans, it makes sense to start with him.
In later life, Krishna Menon became the Defence Minister and Foreign Minister in the governments of his close friend Pandit Nehru, but when Lane got to know him he was a penniless agitator and pamphleteer living off tea, potatoes and twopenny buns in a garret near St Pancras. A lean, ascetic figure with blazing black eyes, a hawk nose and a mane of long grey hair, he had been born in Kerala in 1896. His father, descended from a long line of rajahs, was a well-heeled lawyer and landlord, and the youthful Krishna grew up in luxury. After taking two degrees at Madras University, and dabbling in Madame Blavatsky’s theosophism, he moved to London in 1924. He taught for a time at a school in Hertfordshire, and set about adding to his collection of degrees: these included a BSc at the London School of Economics, taken at night classes, an MA in psychology at University College London, and an MSc on eighteenth-century English political thought. He was also called to the Bar at the Middle Temple; a natural inclination to side with the underdog had been inflamed by Harold Laski at the LSE, and as a lawyer he specialized in defending indigent Indians. A passionate politician, he devoted every minute of the day to the causes of Socialism and Indian independence. Though spurned as a parliamentary candidate for Dundee, he was, from 1924, a member of the Labour Party; he was also, at various times, a member of the Independent Labour Party and the Socialist League. A keen committee man, he was Vice-Chairman of the St Pancras Borough Labour Party (Barbara Castle was a fellow-committee member), Chairman of the St Pancras Tenants’ Defence League, a member of the Haldane Club of socialist lawyers and the National Council for Civil Liberties, and served on the Central Committee of the China Campaign and the Spain-India Committee. He was a familiar figure among the soap-box orators of Hyde Park Corner, as well as producing a constant flow of articles and pamphlets; he was the European representative of the Indian Socialist Party, the international representative of the Indian National Congress, and the Secretary of the India League. He found little time for sleep, allegedly averaging two hours a night, was said to consume between 100 and 150 cups of tea a day, and would often work at the League’s offices till four in the morning, typing and draining his endless cups of tea. He was a vegetarian, unmarried, teetotal and a non-sraoker; his only known vanity consisted of a large collection of well-made suits, a passion he shared with Allen Lane; his eyes would glaze over in mid-conversation as his mind wandered away from what the other person was saying, but his brusque and arrogant manner was combined with sudden acts of kindness and generosity, and on the few occasions when money came his way he would spend it on his friends. He was a famously fast reader, and it was said that he could polish off a detective novel in forty minutes. The journalist Shiela Grant Duff, who helped him organize Nehru’s visit to Britain in 1935, found him ‘an impressive and rather frightening figure’ who ‘looked as if he had stepped out of the tomb of Tutankhamun, saturnine, emaciated and limping heavily on a tall walking stick’.
Menon’s political enthusiasms and his rapidity as a reader had already been exploited by publishers eager to tap the market for books on current affairs. He had edited a series of Topical Books for Selwyn & Blunt, one of the many imprints under the wing of the demented Walter Hutchinson, where Robert Lusty remembered him as a ‘wild-eyed, emaciated, limping Indian’. On being told that his half-starved editor was on the verge of death, Lusty hurried round to a garret off Gray’s Inn Road and found Menon lying on what looked like a bed of nails. ‘I am dying, Lusty, and I want to see you and say goodbye,’ Menon told him, holding out an emaciated hand, and Lusty, in return, ‘muttered some embarrassed good wishes for the journey’. Such narrow escapes had not prevented Menon from editing the Twentieth Century Library for Ronald Boswell at The Bodley Head, where he and Lane first met.
It was through Menon that Lane was introduced to the other claimant to the Pelican throne, W. E. Williams; and whereas the austere and abstemious Menon was never a kindred spirit, and soon fell out of favour with Lane, the convivial and bibulous Williams was a very different matter. Born in 1896, and very much a Welshman in looks and accent – both his parents were Welsh-speakers – he grew up in Manchester, and won a classics scholarship to Manchester University. While a student there he met his wife, Gertrude Rosenblum, who later taught at Bedford College in the University of London and wrote, for Pelican, The Economics of Everyday Life. Williams then trained as a Congregationalist minister, but abandoned his studies after losing his faith and moved into education instead: he brought to adult education in particular the same ‘evangelistic fervour’ that might have marked him out as a clergyman, claiming that he ‘defected to education because in that field I could find scope for my deep social concerns and idealistic beliefs’. They moved to London, where he taught at Ley ton High School for Boys before being appointed a staff tutor in English Literature at London University’s Extra-Mural Board. His commitment to adult education led on to a long and close association with the Workers’ Educational Association.
Leftwards-leaning in a pragmatic, non-Marxist, very English way, the WEA was a fine embodiment of the earnest, nonconformist, self-improving tradition that had inspired J. M. Dent to found Everyman’s Library. During the Twenties and Thirties some 60,000 men and women, many of them future trades union or Labour Party leaders, took its courses: a survey in 1938 revealed that fifteen of the current batch of Labour MPs had studied with the WEA. In cue course Williams was appointed to its National Executive, joining such luminaries as R. H. Tawney, Richard Crossman, Archbishop Temple and A. D. Lindsay, the high-minded Master of Balliol; this gave him an entrée into an intellectual and academic milieu, closely associated with the Fabians and the LSE, that would prove highly compatible with the aims of Pelican Books: as he once put it, ‘the emergence of Penguin seemed a heaven-sent opportunity for making it an ally and collaborator in the mission in which I was deeply involved’. He edited and greatly improved the WEA’s hitherto rather dour publications, including The Highway, The Travel Log and Adult Education, persuading well-known writers and academics to contribute to them. In 1934 he became the Secretary to the British Institute of Adult Education, with an office in Tavistock Square, and when he became involved with Penguin, he and Lane would hold editorial meetings there. Despite a stammer, he became a frequent broadcaster, and wrote a regular column in the Listener. In 1935 he broadened his passion for bringing culture to the masses with his ‘Art for the People’ scheme, whereby modern paintings were borrowed from rich collectors and sent on tour, with lecturers like John Rothenstein and Eric Newton (author of the Pelican European Painting and Sculpture) on hand to explain what they were a 1 about. Two years later he fell in love with a beautiful young Danish journalist named Estrid Bannister; although he remained married to Gertrude until his death in 1977, he and Estrid shared a basement flat in Swiss Cottage, and she advised Penguin and other publishers about Scandinavian writers as well as promoting Danish glassware and furniture. She was promiscuous as well as beautiful, and an affair with a journalist caused Bill Williams particular anguish. ‘But Estrid, darling, not the News Chronicle,’ he begged her, while at the same time giving vent to his loathing for popular culture. ‘Be raped by The Times if you must, but not by a vulgar democratic organ. Tell the bastard that if he makes a pass at you, I’ll choke him with his own infamous paper and stuff it by the yard down his lewd and licentious throat.’
Bill Williams was a large, crumpled, amiable-looking character, with wavy black hair brushed back from his forehead, humorous hangdog eyes, a dapper line in overcoats and what Richard Hoggart described as a ‘heavy cherub’s face’. He was bustling, benign, shrewd, well-connected, a consummate operator and fixer who flourished in the Byzantine, claustrophobic world of cultural bureaucracy; he was also endearingly idle, a man for the broad brushstrokes who left others to fill in the details. He wanted to write, but his contributions to the printed page amounted to little more than brief introductions to collections of essays or anthologies of poetry, and since (or so he once told Lane) he sometimes sat up all night trying to perfect a 300-word blurb for a new Penguin, he was hardly a fast mover. Although he had plans to write Lane’s biography, his memoir of his old friend, perceptive and evocative as it is, amounts to no more than ninety-three small-format pages; he suggested authors and ideas, and was happy to open up his address book, but little evidence remains of his editorial labours. H. L. Beales of the London School of Economics, a man of comparable conviviality and authorial indolence, described him as being broad-minded, tolerant, undogmatic and humorous: he was ‘not the man to wear hair shirts’, and ‘if the barricades ever go up in this country, don’t blame Williams for it. His is the quality that dissolves the barricade spirit.’
Despite his long involvement with Penguin, Williams liked to keep his distance: he was never on the staff, working, as he put it, ‘in a strictly extra-mural capacity and virtually for out-of-pocket expenses’ in the belief that his independence gave him ‘special terms of confidence’ with Lane. Though the buttoned-up Lane never fully reciprocated Williams’s eloquent expressions of affection and admiration, he enjoyed him as a drinking companion and appreciated his connections in the wider world; and whereas Oxbridge dons inflamed his sense of social and intellectual inferiority, Williams, like Richard Hoggart in later years, was the kind of academic – lower middle-class, of provincial origin, educated at a ‘red-brick’ university – with whom he felt at home. Williams, for his part, was to find Lane ‘an infuriating, mercurial colleague who was dearer to me than any other man in my life’. ‘We are a funny pair, seldom communicating our feelings but, I think, always aware of them,’ Williams told Lane in one of the many letters in which he poured forth his feelings without exciting a comparable response. ‘We think for ourselves, and never try to please each other by acquiescence; but with uncanny frequency we reach the same conclusions.’
The other members of the Pelican advisory panel were to prove more transient figures. Lance Beales of the LSE reinforced the leftish flavour of the list, specializing in historians, economists and sociologists. Quick-witted and well-informed, his ‘favourite posture’, according to Williams, ‘was a semi-horizontal one… He looks like the advertisement for Buoyant Easy Chairs, the embodiment of easy affability.’ ‘Wistfully cynical and always very relaxed, Beales struck me as a rather lazy man’, was the verdict of George Weidenfeld, who employed him in an advisory capacity some ten years later; a ‘Falstaffian Fabian socialist’, in Weidenfeld’s words, Beales drank like a fish, so much so that Williams ‘sometimes imagined his inside must resemble the delta of the Nile or the Mississippi’.
Sir Peter Chalmers Mitchell, who advised Pelican on scientific matters, was another heavy drinker: according to Dick, who knew about such things, he mixed ‘the largest and most powerful dry Martinis I have ever been privileged to consume’, and he was once reported as ‘getting in a mess with a car and a lamppost’. Chalmers-Mitchell was in his seventies when he joined Pelican as an advisory editor in exchange for £50 a year (or, Lane promised, £100 if the series proved a success). A biologist by training, he was best known as the founder of Whipsnade Zoo, and had recently retired from a thirty-year stint as the Secretary of the London Zoo, which, according to Solly Zuckerman, he had ruled ‘with a rod of iron’. He commissioned Berthold Lubetkin to design the famous Penguin Pool, which was opened in 1933 and visited two years later by Edward Young with sketchbook in hand; two of his fellow-directors, Solly Zuckerman and Julian Huxley, would both have connections with Penguin Books, and Lane himself would, in due course, become a director of the Zoo and entertain guests to lunch in its restaurant. Despite being a keen member of the Savile Club, Chalmers Mitchell’s political sympathies were ‘with the extreme Left’, according to the DNB, albeit of the anarchist variety. After his retirement from the Zoo in 1935, he went to live in Málaga. The following February he was unexpectedly joined there by Arthur Koestler, who was covering the Civil War for the News Chronicle and in flight from Franco’s forces, and they sat in deckchairs on his veranda swigging gin and french as the fascists tightened their grip on the town; Sir Peter was whisked away at the last minute in a British destroyer but Koestler, well-known for his left-wing views, was led away to prison and possible execution. Back in Britain, Sir Peter was invited to replace an equally eminent scientist, Lancelot Hogben, on the advisory panel of Pelican Books. He offered his views on all kinds of books, including The Oregon Trail: he severed his connection with the firm in 1939, but not before he had effected fruitful introductions to fellow-scientists like J. B. S. Haldane, whom Lane first encountered at a ‘leftish party’ in Park Lane.
The first Pelican list included, in addition to the works by Shaw and Wells, Julian Huxley’s Essays in Popular Science, Leonard Woolley’s Digging up the Past, Olaf Stapledon’s Last and First Men and G. D. H. Cole’s Practical Economics; although the others were all reissues of books bought from hardback publishers, the G. D. H. Cole marked a new departure as a venture into original publishing, and was the first book to be commissioned by Penguin. In December Lane sent Krishna Menon a list of new titles approved by the Editorial Committee, including R. H. Tawney’s Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, Halévy’s History of the English People, James Jeans’s The Mysterious Universe, Freud’s Psychopathology of Everyday Life, Clive Bell’s Civilization and Woolley’s Ur of the Chaldees; but relations between the two men were rapidly deteriorating. Both complained of poor communications, with Lane grumbling that he had heard nothing for months from Menon about which titles he proposed to take on, and Menon complaining that Lane had not been in touch about the contractual negotiations for these books: but the truth of the matter was that Lane, mercurial and easily bored, found the austere and unconvivial Menon a far from kindred spirit, and was happy to freeze him out. Menon lectured him for an hour in a Soho restaurant in a low monotone, and Lane, who could neither hear nor understand what he was trying to say, finally lost patience and called him a ‘bottleneck’, at which Menon stormed out in a rage; Menon, ill, under-nourished and overworked, felt bruised and isolated. He complained that Lane never returned his calls or kept him informed, and seemed to inhabit ‘a world which paralyses all action and makes decent people feel they don’t fit in with things’. ‘I shall be most grateful if you will make an appointment for me to see you,’ he told Lane in November 1938. ‘I have made several efforts to get in touch with you and I have also written, but I have never been able to get any reply.’ Menon’s solicitors and Rubinstein, Nash began an exchange of letters, and eventually, after Lane had left on a tour of India and the Middle East, Dick wrote to terminate Menon’s agreement with the firm. ‘Last time when we met you promised to put in order before you left for the East arrangements with regard to the Pelican Books,’ Menon wrote to his departed boss. ‘Your letter takes me by surprise. Each time we meet you make a promise which you fail to keep…’ Menon was paid off with a cheque for £125; his solicitor made off with the money, and Menon refused to press charges on the grounds that he had a wife and child, and needed the money far more than he did. Freud’s Totem and Taboo was the last Pelican to bear his name. It was a sad end to the story; but although it was sometimes claimed that Krishna Menon’s political hostility to the West was directly attributable to his treatment by Lane, his entries in Who’s Who always mentioned the fact that he had been the first editor of Pelican Books. Lane, it seems, was less forgiving: years later, Tony Godwin noticed how, at the mere mention of Menon’s name, Lane’s ‘voice seethed with venom. It gave me goose pimples merely to hear such animosity’ ‘The reason for our split with Menon was that we found him so dilatory and so incapable of making up his mind,’ Lane himself recalled. ‘It was a unanimous decision that we could not continue with him.’
Writing in Left Review in May 1938, Lane declared that more and more people were demanding ‘access to contemporary thought and to a reasonable body of scientific knowledge’, that ‘we are now in a position to control our future in the light of our knowledge of the past’, and that ‘we have within our grasp the elements of true civilization, the ending of a pre-historic age’. His sixpennies provided ‘access to some of that knowledge on which a reasonable life must be based… There are many who despair at what they regard as the low level of the people’s intelligence. We, however, believed in the existence in this country of a vast reading public for intelligent books at a low price, and staked everything on it’ – and in doing so Penguin had ‘provided a complete answer to those who despair of the state of England’. These were noble words, and no doubt Bill Williams would have claimed their authorship, but Lane was not alone in his views. The Spectator described Pelicans as ‘a fact of enormous importance in the struggle to overcome economic restrictions to knowledge’. The series was proving ‘a decisive influence on the growth of popular understanding of the world’, and ‘if there is any sense in saying that the culture of the world should be accessible to all without distinctions of wealth, such publications are helping to make it true’. Lane could not have asked for a finer tribute.