Another new world was waiting to be developed on the other side of the Atlantic, and it was one that would never prove congenial. America and Allen Lane were curiously incompatible, at least in publishing terms: to his tweedier, old-fashioned colleagues in the London book world, Lane may have seemed an alarmingly modern and mid-Atlantic figure, bustling about in his Van Heusen shirts and Cary Grant suits and demolishing the sacred tenets of the trade, but once in New York he seemed almost reactionary, radiating disapproval of American business methods and refusing to recognize that what worked in a country like Britain might not be applicable in Chicago or Arizona. America brought out the worst in him, and in his dealings with American publishers, and with those he employed to run the Penguin operation in the States, he revealed himself at his most elusive and duplicitous.
Contrary to expectations, mass-market paperbacks were a later arrival in the States than in England. In the summer of 1938 Robert de Graff, a former salesman with Doubleday, set up Pocket Books, ‘complete and unabridged’ paperback editions of recently published titles and classics, selling at 25 cents apiece. Unlike Penguins, they boasted picture jackets, some designed by McKnight Kauffer; they were squatter in shape, the pages had red coloured edges to disguise the poor-quality paper, and the colophon consisted of a bespectacled kangaroo named Gertrude, who lost her glasses when redesigned by Walt Disney. Unlike Lane, de Graff decided to do some market research before he took the plunge. A questionnaire was sent to 40,000 prospective readers in New York City, and he test-marketed 1,000 copies of Pearl Buck’s The Good Earth. Reactions were favourable, but even so de Graff moved ahead with caution. Anxious to cut his prices to the bone, he immediately opted for ‘perfect’ binding, whereby the folded ‘sections’ of the book were not sewn, as in hardbacks or the early Penguins, but were guillotined on all four sides and then glued along the spine; he offered authors or their hardback publishers a modest 4 per cent royalty; and, to begin with, he made his books available only within New York City. The first ten titles included Agatha Christie’s evergreen The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, Thornton Wilder’s The Bridge of San Luis Rey and James Hilton’s Lost Horizon, as well as the out-of-copyright Wuthering Heights, The Way of All Flesh and five of Shakespeare’s tragedies. Hardback publishers were hostile at first, with Cass Canfield refusing to sub-lease Harper & Row titles on the familiar ground that a paperback edition would undermine hardback sales: but then Simon & Schuster, de Graff’s partners in the business and its eventual owners, decided to let him have the rights in Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People, and the floodgates were opened. A total of 1.3 million copies had been sold by 1941, by which time the total sales of Pocket Books had reached 8.5 million. The paperback revolution had arrived in America, and others hurried to join in: Avon Books was set up in 1941, the Popular Library in 1942, and Dell in 1943.
America was far too large and rich a market to be ignored, and, where the rights were free, Penguins were available in the States from the very beginning: but, as Lane was soon to discover, the book trade was run on very different lines, at least where paperbacks were concerned. Bookshops were in short supply outside the major cities and university campuses, which specialized in academic monographs and set texts: like its rivals and successors, Pocket Books did 80 per cent of their business through independent magazine distributors, who then sold the books on to news-stands, drugstores, cigar stores and variety stores. Magazine distribution was a viciously competitive world, violent and gangster-ridden: in Chicago, where the Annenberg family made their fortunes as magazine distributors, twenty-seven news-dealers had been killed in the turf wars of the early years of the century. American paperbackers believed in saturating the market, and then treating as ‘returns’ those copies that could not be sold. In England returns, if agreed to at all, involved exchanging a few unsaleable books for credit or other titles of comparable value, but in America the front covers were torn off and returned as evidence, while the books themselves were destroyed; and, even in those early days, up to 50 per cent of copies sold could end up as returns. Like magazines, paperbacks had a short shelf-life, and were treated accordingly.
Quite forgetting his initial dependence on Woolworth’s, his contempt for the hidebound British book trade and his readiness to experiment with book-dispensing machines and the like, Lane regarded American sales and distribution methods as a barbarous business to which he was loath to lend his name; he disliked, too, the American insistence on illustrated covers, and would find his American managers’ eagerness to publish books in the States for the American market increasingly hard to accept. But these horrors were undreamed of when, shortly before the outbreak of war, he set up Penguin Books Inc. to handle the sales and distribution of his books in the States. He chose as his American manager a twenty-two-year-old American named Ian Ballantine, who had, until recently, been doing postgraduate work at the LSE under the supervision of H. L. Beales. Ballantine had written a thesis on the book trade: Lane may or may not have read it, but either way he was sufficiently impressed by the young man to offer him the job. Ballantine’s fiancée, Betty, was only eighteen, and working in a bank in the Channel Islands, when she received a cable asking her to marry him at once and come to New York. She handed in her notice and took the first boat to London, where Lane gave the couple lunch and offered them a 49 per cent share in Penguin Inc.; and within a week they were on board ship, married and bearing with them $500, a gift from her father, with which to start out on their new life together.
Once in New York, they took a first-floor room on East 17th Street, bought some second-hand furniture, agreed to pay themselves $15 a week each, and got down to work. ‘I think I have come back from England with a combination that will finally make the quarter book a permanent feature of American publishing,’ Ballantine observed: already he was anticipating something more than the mere importing of Harmondsworth Penguins, for ‘if one can build up sales in America on the basis of importations and so organize a distribution system which can handle 25,000 of a single title, the point will have been reached at which Penguin Books Inc. starts publishing in America.’ In the meantime a friend from Ice Cream World magazine helped with the advertising, while the Ballantines set about importing books from England for sale at 25 cents apiece. These arrived, by sea, in crates of 1,000; the books had, somehow, to be manhandled up to the first floor before, with luck, being sent on their various ways. Some titles had no obvious appeal in America, so they ordered a mere 200 of these; others, like Harold Nicolson’s Why Britain is at War, went on to sell 20,000 copies, with some copies being airmailed out via Lisbon while others made their way through Italy. On the day war broke out John and Nora Lane were sent to New York to sign the deeds of incorporation: John signed them as ‘John Lane’ rather than John Lane on behalf of Penguin Books’, which caused problems after he died without leaving a will, since the American company now passed by default to his old parents in Oxfordshire.
One of the problems with importing books from England was that under the notorious ‘manufacturing clause’, a feature of US copyright law designed to keep American printers in business, it was only permissible to import 1,500 copies of books printed outside the United States: reprinting the book in America would entitle its author to the protection of American copyright, but any imported copies over the minimum permitted would instantly forfeit copyright. While working on his thesis for the LSE, Ballantine had discovered, or thought he had discovered, that it would be possible to import books with ‘resigned’ copyrights, though whether the authors ‘resigned’ their American copyrights to Penguin Inc., or whether Penguin Inc. ‘resigned’ any copyright claims in imported titles, remains unclear: either way, as the war began to take effect, and the U-boats took their toll on transatlantic convoys, the whole business of importing Penguins into America became increasingly vexed. Ballantine was frustrated by Lane’s refusal to answer letters about shipping out printing plates, so enabling him to print in America and publish titles excluded by the manufacturing clause; he was disappointed by Lane’s refusal to accept that there might be a market for Tom Wintringham’s Penguin Special, New Ways of War, still more so since John Wheeler-Bennett, the Head of the British Press Service in Washington, had told him he ‘thought it the best possible propaganda as it dramatizes for every American, no matter what his class, how completely the entire population of Britain is involved in the war’; he even begged Lane to bring some much-needed books with him as hand luggage on his next trip to the States. Equally problematic was the wartime deterioration of production standards: straw-coloured paper, rusting staples and cramped typography might be tolerable – obligatory – in Britain, but not in the States, where the competition was not, as yet, shackled by paper quotas. ‘The paper got to be the same colour as the ink,’ Ballantine later complained to Lane. ‘That was acceptable in England, because you read what you could, but it was not acceptable here.’ American department stores were not prepared to stock shoddy-looking English paperbacks, however fine their contents: he needed laminated and, ideally, illustrated covers if he was to keep Penguins on the news-stands, and if he could print them in the States, so much the better.
While Ballantine nursed his frustrations, and entertained Dick on a flying visit in May 1940 – according to reports in the Press, he had come over to mastermind the sale of 50,000 copies of the cartoonist David Low’s Europe since Versailles to a mysterious Englishman based in the States – a figure from Lane’s past was about to impinge on the American scene. When war broke out, Kurt Enoch, still based in Paris, had been interned as an enemy alien, and separated from his wife and daughters. They had made their various ways to Marseilles, where they had been provided with US visas, crossed the Pyrenees, travelled on to Lisbon, and taken a Greek ship to New York. Once installed, Enoch began to size up the American publishing scene with the eyes of a veteran, noting the shortage of bookshops, the importance of literary agents, the huge sums spent on advertising and promotion, and the neglect of backlists and the classics, not least by Pocket Books. When, in 1941, Lane made his way to New York by way of Montreal, he invited Enoch round to his hotel and told him that he was thinking of closing down Penguin Inc. if matters didn’t improve. Enoch, echoing Ballantine, told him that he should print and publish in the States, and at the same time give him a job. Lane pointed out that, under wartime exchange regulations, it was impossible for him to transfer the necessary funds to the States; when Enoch suggested that he should try to raise start-up funds in New York, Lane gave him ‘a quick and decisive “yes”’, and promised him a 5 per cent share in the reconstituted Penguin Inc. Kurt Wolff, another German-Jewish publisher recently arrived in the States, lent Enoch some money, later used to set up Pantheon Books; and after meeting Ballantine, whom he found a ‘polite, serious young gentleman with whom I should be able to establish a good working and sympathetic personal relationship’, Enoch set about putting the business on a firmer footing. It was agreed that Ballantine would look after sales and distribution, while Enoch was responsible for production and design, and until some more furniture arrived, the new Vice-President of Penguin Inc. perched on an empty crate.
The bombing of Pearl Harbor proved the salvation of Penguin Inc., and the huge demand for cheap, stapled Armed Services Editions as well as for conventional paperbacks made fortunes for those involved; as the New York World Telegram put it, ‘Pocket-sized Books, turned out like cars, are turning over Pocketfuls of Money’ Ballantine got in touch with Colonel Greene of the Infantry Journal, who was keen to publish a line of paperbacks for new recruits; realizing that Harmondsworth’s hugely successful two-volume Aircraft Recognition failed to cover Japanese fighters and bombers, the Ballantines and their young editor, Walter Pitkin, working at the kichen table, produced What’s That Plane? for the colonel, nipping in ahead of a planned Pocket Book on the same subject and eventually selling over 400,000 copies. Other Fighting Forces publications produced by Penguin Inc. included The New Soldier Handbook and How the Jap Army Fights. When paper quotas, based on past use, were introduced in 1943, Enoch was able to tap into the Infantry Journal’s allowance.
With sales to the services providing a large and reliable turnover of books originated and published in the States, Ballantine felt free to flex his muscles as a fully-fledged paperback publisher. He cultivated hardback publishers with a view to buying paperback rights; the powerful Curtis Circulating Company, the distribution arm of the group that published the Saturday Evening Post and the Ladies’ Home Journal, agreed to act as the firm’s national distributor, providing access to thousands of new outlets; longer print-runs made it possible for Enoch to print on faster and cheaper rotary presses and make full use of ‘perfect’ binding. But all was not well. Back in England, Lane resented Ballantine’s increasing independence, his addiction to picture jackets, and his readiness to accept the norms of American paperback life; Ballantine, for his part, was preparing to set up on his own under the imprint of Bantam Books. In 1944 Marshall Field III, the department store tycoon, bought Simon & Schuster and Pocket Books; worried by a pending imbalance of power, a cartel of hardback publishers, including Random House, Harper’s, Scribner’s, Little, Brown and the Book of the Month Club, bought Grosset & Dunlap, a hardback reprint firm specializing in bestsellers. Convinced that the future lay with popular mass-market paperbacks of the kind published by Pocket, Dell and Avon, Ballantine approached Bennett Cerf of Random House, the head of the cartel, about the possibility of their backing Bantam as a rival to Pocket Books, with Grosset & Dunlap and Curtis between them covering bookshop and magazine outlets.
Kurt Enoch knew nothing of this, but was anxious that Penguin Inc. should follow in the Penguin tradition. In 1944, at the start of a six-month tour of North and South America, Lane arrived in New York, and instantly sided with Enoch. The following year Bantam was incorporated, with Curtis and the Grosset consortium each owning 42.5 per cent of the shares. Ballantine and Betty sold back their 49 per cent share in Penguin Inc. for a dollar, and took with them most of the staff and the Infantry Journal contract. ‘Kurt, in six months you’ll be broke,’ Ballantine told his former colleague, whom he left sitting in an empty office.
Since Enoch needed help and had, as yet, an imperfect command of English, Lane sent Frostie to New York in the summer of 1945 to lend him a hand. She made her mark at once, commissioning, as the first American Pelicans, books by the anthropologist Ruth Benedict and the political pundit Walter Lippmann, appointing two full-time editors, and employing as a reader Saul Bellow, who remembered her as being ‘angelic’ and ‘dovelike and forbearing’. With Enoch beside her, she slogged round American publishers’ offices, trying to persuade them to license books to Penguin Inc. and to ignore Ballantine’s oft-repeated claim that ‘Penguins will be out of business in six months’. She found Enoch ‘the most lugubrious and depressing person to work with’, and spending time with him was ‘like living with the Gestapo’. ‘There is something about his “Pardon me” and his pale little stare which brings out the worst in one,’ she told Lane. Nor did they see eye-to-eye on the vexed issue of covers, since ‘his major stand is that the covers must have art work in the case of fiction, and that each one, within the framework of a consistent design, must be treated as an individual book’. Enoch’s view would, in due course, prevail on both sides of the Atlantic, but it would not be an easy victory.
Lane was a master of divide and rule, and, unknown to Enoch, he had another candidate in mind to help run Penguin Inc. Victor Weybright was a convivial, rubicund anglophile, keen on bow ties, rolled umbrellas and hunting in the country round his farm in Maryland. During the war he had run the London branch of the Office of War Information, attached to the American Embassy, and had busied himself entertaining and getting to know writers, publishers and newspaper editors. He and Lane got on well together, so much so that he was appointed Christine’s godfather (Agatha Christie was her godmother). Although his pre-war experience of publishing had been fairly modest – he had been an editorial adviser to Reader’s Digest, and had worked for some obscure technical publishers – Lane asked him if he would be his personal representative and report back to him about Penguin Inc. in particular, and American paperback publishing in general.
Back home in the States, Weybright was unimpressed by the fare on offer from American paperback firms, finding it ‘devoid of the taste and vision which had characterized ten years of Penguins and Pelicans in England’. His researches concluded, he turned up unannounced at the offices of Penguin Inc., now housed in a scruffy building occupied by rug and toy manufacturers. Enoch, who knew nothing of Weybright’s mission, kept him waiting for two hours: he assumed his visitor was ‘a stooge for Lane and an intruder’, but although the two men had little in common beyond the smoking of pipes, he found Weybright ‘amiable and congenial’, and suggested that, since they were to be colleagues, he should buy half the notional 40 per cent of Penguin Inc. recently promised him by Lane.
Enoch was not best pleased when the shareholding failed to materialize, and after Lane had threatened to wind up Penguin Inc. unless Weybright could convince him that its operations were editorially compatible with those of Harmondsworth, Dick was despatched to sort matters out. Despite the apparent urgency of his mission, he travelled out on a slow-moving freighter; according to Weybright, ‘the tall, apple-cheeked countryman’ seemed completely baffled by his mission, though down in Maryland Dick ‘moved among the workers and talked with the farmers in the manner of a beardless Tolstoy, never so happy as when his boots were muddy and his sleeves rolled up’. Dick dutifully disapproved of the American desire for picture jackets, while at the same time retailing a strong line in louche naval stories; he was, Weybright concluded, ‘a lovable man, so accustomed to reflecting the buoyancy and energy of Allen Lane that he was generally accepted as a mysterious partner full of deep and unutterable wisdom’. Although Enoch and Weybright got what they wanted, Lane retained his grip on the voting shares: the whole affair, Enoch later wrote, ‘put me on my guard and raised doubts with regard to Allen’s personal reliability and credibility’, and he noted how, in the years to come, other American publishers would find themselves at the receiving end of Lane’s ‘unfortunate arbitrariness and inconsistencies’.
With the shareholding sorted out, however unsatisfactorily, Frostie was able to return home while Enoch and Weybright set about building up a list. ‘We will continue to aim for the consistent rather than the casual reader. Our books will be of permanent value rather than one-shot,’ Weybright reported back to Lane. Works by Virginia Woolf, E. M. Forster, D. H. Lawrence, Joyce, dos Passos, Moravia, Silone and Carson McCullers were published; and although the firm was chronically under-capitalized – not least because currency restrictions made it almost impossible for Lane to provide funds from Britain – matters were momentarily improved when Erskine Caldwell’s God’s Little Acre, published by Penguin Inc. in March 1946, sold over a million copies. Pocket Books, the market-leaders, were being successfully attacked on their own ground, but Lane was unimpressed. Once again, picture covers were the problem. ‘I am convinced more than ever that if we want to attract the American masses to good literature, we have got to display on our covers more than a beautiful bit of typography, no matter how distinguished it may be. Frostie thinks otherwise,’ Weybright told Lane, who had voiced objections to the covers as well as the contents of novels by Faulkner, Caldwell, James M. Cain, James T. Farrell and other authors from what he referred to as the ‘Porno Books’ section of the list. Pocket Books copied the magazines, Bantam copied Pocket Books, and Penguin could not afford to lag too far behind: Americans, Weybright suggested, were ‘more elementary than the Britishers’ and had been ‘schooled from infancy to disdain even the best product unless it is smoothly packaged and merchandised’.
Penguin Inc.’s jackets were unusually elegant, cleverly designed and made use of such fine artists as Robert Jonas, but Lane’s hostility was more than aesthetic. The post-war lifting of paper restrictions had triggered an orgy of over-production: the market was glutted with unwanted paperbacks, vast numbers of which had to be pulped. Having to write off a sizeable chunk of each print-run added further strains to the under-funded Penguin Inc., which had become increasingly dependent on credit from printers, and from the giant Chicago firm of W. F. Hall in particular. Lane worried that Hall might end up taking over Penguin Inc., and would then be able to use the Penguin name in the States. He wanted Penguin Inc. to take more books from Harmondsworth, and he remained as hostile as ever to American sales and distribution methods. According to Weybright, he agreed to provide Penguin Inc. with the funds they needed to reduce their dependence on Hall, but reneged on his promise while in the States; Lane later claimed that he could not have committed himself without the formal permission of the Bank of England. Whatever the truth of the matter, an ad hominem argument broke out between the two men, and words were exchanged which Lane, for his part, found hard to forgive.
Matters went from bad to worse, with suspicion and resentment mounting on both sides. According to Weybright, Lane worried that, with America now the major English-speaking nation, Penguin Inc. could become larger and more powerful than its English parent, and that he would lose control; on a visit to London, Weybright noticed that Allen Lane underneath was ‘a “little Englishman” as only a Welshman can be’. In the spring of 1947 Weybright visited London again on what turned out to be a fruitless mission, lugging with him, via Shannon, some fifteen-foot-tall dogwood trees which Lane wanted to plant at Priory Farm in memory of John, who had once written a lyrical letter home about the dogwood trees in blossom in the Hudson Valley. Later that year Lane and Lettice went to the States. After staying with Weybright in Maryland, they moved back to New York to a suite in the Elysée Hotel, much favoured by visiting publishers and often referred to as the ‘easy lay’. When Weybright arrived there for what he had expected to be a serious business meeting, he found the suite crammed with heavy-drinking party-goers, and Lane in no mood for a deep discussion. It was, for Weybright, a moment of revelation: Lane had refused to provide credit in the dealings with the Chicago printers; Weybright could no longer stand his suspicious attitude, and was fed up with having to spy on Enoch. After the Lanes had returned to England, taking with them thirty-two items of luggage, both sides prepared for a divorce. In London that autumn a separation was agreed. Lane came to see Weybright and Enoch at their hotel; he had covered a black eye with a patch, and seemed unamused when Weybright, attempting levity, made a crack about the Nelson touch. ‘Allen was as grim as any member of the Royal Family seeing the Union Jack come down on a liberated colony,’ Weybright remembered, adding that ‘Billy Williams and Eunice Frost sat sadly in the sidelines’: in Williams’s opinion, Weybright had ‘discharged his responsibilities admirably’, not least by resisting the temptation to lower editorial standards in pursuit of sales. It was agreed that Enoch and Weybright should be able to use the Penguin and Pelican imprints for a further year, until their own new firm, grandly entitled the New American Library and brought into being on 1 January 1948, was in a position to publish its first books under the Signet and Mentor imprints.
NAL went on to become one of the most distinguished and successful American paperback imprints; early Signet bestsellers included novels by Truman Capote, Gore Vidal and William Faulkner, while the Mentor list, closely modelled on Pelicans, published a philosophy series edited by Isaiah Berlin. No love was lost between the former partners in London and New York. ‘The cover of The Tyranny of Sex makes me sick, and I shall be very glad indeed when our name stops being used for books of this nature,’ Lane told Morris Ernst, who was to act as his intermediary and informant in his dealings with American publishers over the next decade or so. Harry Paroissien, who had joined Penguin in 1947, was sent out to look after the sale of Penguin titles in America, initially under the Allen Lane imprint. ‘Whatever comes, we keep absolutely clear of this pair, and of any organization with which they may be concerned,’ Lane told his lieutenant apropos Messrs Weybright and Enoch, and Paroissien reported home about ‘that unpleasant couple, the bouncing Victor and the cold, fish-like Enoch’, whom he professed to ‘dislike more than anyone I have met on either side of the Atlantic’. Nor, as it turned out, would the alliance between Weybright and Enoch prove harmonious: Weybright found his partner ‘dictatorial’ and prone to a ‘secret authoritarianism’, while the austere Enoch disapproved of Weybright’s love of hunting, in much the same way as he had earlier frowned upon Holroyd-Reece. Ian Ballantine, in the meantime, turned up in London to enquire about the possibility of his buying Penguin Inc. Paroissien had found him ‘not quite such a squirt as I had expected’, and Lane thought him ‘not a bad egg’, but despite his years at the LSE, Ballantine mistook English self-deprecation for the genuine article: Lane told Paroissien how, ‘after having ladled cut my usual line on my being too old for the turmoil of publishing, and that what I craved for was a pleasant and quiet old age in the country, he took me more seriously than I intended’. Similar misapprehensions had bedevilled Lane’s American adventures, and worse were to come in the years ahead.