One of the melancholy truths of institutional life is that many of those involved come to think of themselves as indispensable and indestructible, yet after their departure – whether voluntary or enforced – the waters close over so quickly that it is as if they had never been; and Penguin was no exception. ‘You and Bill must realize, as so many of our publishing colleagues do, what your contributions amount to and, as Bill has said so often, we must never part. We are a trinity without which the firm would be quite different,’ Lane told Frostie from a Caribbean cruise ship: but the trinity’s days were numbered, and a new generation was waiting to make its mark.
Frostie’s reaction is not recorded, but Bill Williams was happy to go along with such sentiments, whatever the truth of the situation. ‘During our many years of comradeship we have never been closer than we are now and, as we both realize, we have reached this harmony of outlook without even making a conscious effort to do so,’ he told Lane, and later he confided that ‘Nothing in my life has been as rewarding, as exhilarating, or as worthwhile as my place at your side – at your side and two paces to the rear. I hope I shall maintain that stance and posture till I pass on – to publish Penguins in Paradise!’ As for taking on new members of staff, ‘I don’t think we need any additional chaps on the editorial side. We are an effective, if mixed, team. You are constantly burgeoning new and fruitful ideas; I play the elder statesman with some success, and do a fair amount of keeping authors sweet; Frostie when she is on form is a persuasive go-between, a good judge of a book and equally bright on the ideas side; Glover makes a most serviceable encyclopaedia…’ And, as if that weren’t enough, ‘You have an incandescent quality which I relish very much indeed, even in its more exasperating aspects!’
But for all his talk of editing Penguins in Paradise, Williams’s attention was elsewhere for much of the time, and, shrewd as he was, he was becoming out of touch and out of date. After Lane’s death he confessed that he found his work on the Arts Council more interesting and more important than his Penguin connection, and he relished the perks of life as a cultural bureaucrat. Dennis Foreman remembered him as a ‘curt, big, bluff organizer, like a football manager in the field of culture, socially oriented rather than arts oriented’; John Curtis, a young Penguin colleague, thought of him as ‘a very powerful éminence rouge’, with a finger in every pie (in due course these would include a Trusteeship of the National Gallery); in Richard Hoggart’s opinion, he was the last ‘dominant’ Secretary-General of the Arts, famed for telling an over-active Chairman, ‘You are the admiral; I am the captain. Now get off my bridge.’ Kenneth Clark, when Chairman, was granted one short interview a week with the Secretary-General, and handed a glass of sherry; he was not allowed a secretary, but Williams ‘said that his own secretary would bring me in such letters as it was appropriate for me to see, together with his answers’. Exercising such power in the ornate and gilt surroundings of the Astors’ old house in St James’s Square was heady stuff, and Penguin may have seemed, by comparison, dingy and sub-fusc.
Lane still valued Williams as a drinking partner, but had no illusions about his value to, or interest in, the firm; and, with their sixtieth birthdays looming, both Williams and Glover seemed ever more dispensable. ‘There is no question that Glover has a malign influence in the firm,’ Lane told Dick in December 1957. ‘He hasn’t a single member of his staff with any creative ability. WEW is weak and drifts with the stream.’ Nine months later, he told Frostie that he wanted both men to be out of the firm within the next two to three years, by the end of which time she would be ‘the only permanent officer on the watch’: giving Williams a further lease of life would depend on whether or not he had encouraged a new generation of editors, ‘and I don’t think this will be easy for him’. Williams had been made a director in 1957, but he had, in Lane’s opinion, ‘become increasingly unreliable, and at times I doubt his loyalty’.
Though unsparing of her colleagues, Frostie alone seemed immune to criticism; but her health remained a constant source of worry, and although she worked herself as hard as ever, she was increasingly out of touch with younger writers and publishing editors. She had problems with her breathing, but Lane thought her ailments were essentially ‘psychosomatic’; and throughout the Fifties he was forever dropping her fond but worried notes, suggesting an ‘overhaul’ in the London Clinic, urging her to work more from home, begging her not to fret when a nervous or physical breakdown resulted in her being out of the office for weeks on end. ‘The trouble is that she has no idea of how to organize her life, and if she goes on I can see nothing but a series of breakdowns,’ he told Paroissien. Bill Williams was equally anxious. Writing to Lane after one particularly bad bout, he reported, with relief, that she was calmer and ‘not getting into people’s hair in the office’: part of the problem, as he saw it, lay in her devotion to Lane, and ‘she would work best if she were not having to see you several times a day, and could be left alone for several days on end’. Her laughter became ever more hysterical, and still more so when Lane was present; she burst into tears when Hilary Rubinstein, then a young editor at Gollancz, told her over lunch that they were not prepared to license some Dorothy Sayers novels to Penguin. As her appearances in the office became increasingly intermittent, a degree of paranoia set in: she felt that her contribution to the firm’s original publishing was neglected and overlooked, and as Penguin politics became more Machiavellian, she worried that she too might fall victim to a conspiracy of courtiers. ‘So little credit seems to come to me for the initiation of so many aspects of Puffins (probably unknown to you), the majority of handbooks, including their initiation, planning with the author, encouragement and criticism and detailed work,’ she told Lane in a memo which was almost certainly never sent. She went on to cite her close involvement with Elizabeth David’s Mediterranean Food – she and Lane had defied the disapproval of their colleagues by starting a cookery list, and she had commissioned John Minton to draw the cover – and reminded him of how she had brought to the firm two books by Kenneth Clark, The Meaning of Art and Landscape into Art, as well as Herbert Read’s Modern Art. Lane had suggested that, given the state of her health, she should no longer attend policy meetings, and should try to disassociate herself as much as possible from the politics of office life, but ‘I shouldn’t be human if I didn’t feel a certain difficulty in cutting myself away… This is not the way I thought things would go.’ As for the editorial meetings held in Bill Williams’s office, ‘I, more than anyone, have been responsible for making them happen – even to the extent of carrying that little white suitcase in which everything was put when we used to meet up in London.’ ‘I am a fighter, but not for myself,’ she told him in another note in which she suggested that Glover and Schmoller were closer in spirit to university presses than to the ‘interpretative amateurism’ she cherished at Penguin. She felt vulnerable and exposed, for ‘if the attitudes which have been expressed about Bill (via Glover on his own and on behalf of the junior staff) also represent the general attitude to me, then it is unrealistic to expect it to work. There is no point in having two people outside the house who are objects of hostility and contempt.’ It was hard for her to struggle on ‘with the feeling, like Bill, that I have no backing, and am only tolerated’.
Relief seemed on hand when, in the summer of 1957, Frostie announced her engagement, so averting her ‘personal nightmare’ of ‘ending up in some Earl’s Court rooming-house’. Harry Kemp was a minor poet, and the author of seven slim volumes; he had been a protégé of Robert Graves and Laura Riding, and had lived with them for a time with his first wife. According to his obituarist in the Independent, he was ‘a small, ruddy-faced man, old fashioned in his dress, credulous in his judgements’; the author of ‘cool, well-shaped poems’, he was a ‘lively raconteur with a roving and satirical eye’. His eye proved rather too roving, but for the time being Bill Williams seemed impressed: Frostie, he told Lane, had brought her ‘prospective mate’ into the office, and he seemed ‘very agreeable: good-looking in an athletic sort of way, nicely mannered, and easy and intelligent in conversation’. The happy couple planned to live in Lewes, and ‘thank God she has got someone to cry on instead of us!’ Harold Raymond wrote to the bride-to-be with his congratulations, and professed himself amazed that no one had snapped her up before: ‘I should have thought someone would have clubbed you if he couldn’t have persuaded you. Young men can’t be what they were in my time!’ Frostie busied herself flat-hunting: according to Bill Williams, Kemp did nothing but watch cricket, ‘and contents himself with exclaiming “bad show!” when she reports that flats have been snatched from under her nose’.
Once installed in Lewes, Frostie came into the office far less often, but books and files and papers were sent to her in a steady flow. She was made a director of the firm, and for a time, Lane told Paroissien, she seemed happy and ‘the complete woman of affairs’; but before long the old problems had returned, and Lane was begging her not to overdo it, reminding her that ‘at the age of 42, you shouldn’t have to be humping great baskets of books half across London’. He sent her to a health farm, and wrote a stern note to her negligent spouse: her current condition was ‘a very serious matter which brooks of no further delay’, and he asked Kemp to come and see him about it. Referring to her ‘current breakdown’, Williams told Lane that she had lost her ‘drive and sense of proportion’, and had become ‘more and more fussy, more and more unable to distinguish between the important and the trivial, and more and more inclined to rattle the juniors’. She found it impossible to delegate, and carried everything in her head or on ‘sundry scraps of paper’. Her work, he declared, should be divided between a newly appointed team of young editors who were waiting in the wings.
Alan Glover, much to his distress, was seen as an irrelevance, and was increasingly ignored. When he learned that Lane, without consulting him, had arranged for John Curtis to ‘have a go’ at a proposed series of Picture Pelicans, he gave vent to his feelings with ‘deep and bitter regret’. ‘In the face of this humiliation which you have seen fit to impose on me before not only my equals, I cannot suppose that I am performing any useful purpose here at all, or without a complete loss of self-respect stay here.’ If Lane so wished, he was ready to ‘walk out without any further ado’. No answer was forthcoming, so he returned to the matter a few days later. ‘It sometimes seems to me,’ he wrote, ‘and I don’t think I’m unique in having the feeling, that you sometimes think that people in the firm are wrong just because they’re in the firm, whereas anything that comes from an outsider is valuable and exciting just because it comes from outside.’
With Glover due to retire in 1960, Bill Williams and Eunice Frost fast fading from the scene, and the new generation of editors still in their twenties, Lane began to look elsewhere for an editorial right-hand man. ‘We can spot the chaps who want to “go into publishing” in the belief that it is a round of cocktail parties and boy friends,’ Paroissien once warned him, pandering to Lane’s reservations about the Eton and Oxford school of publisher, and in due course a possible alternative presented itself. While on holiday in Spain in 1957 Lane read, on Frostie’s recommendation, The Uses of Literacy. It was, he told her, a first-class piece of work, and although he knew nothing about the author, ‘I have a hunch he’s the man we may be looking for on the editorial side.’ Richard Hoggart had no practical experience of publishing, and no desire to abandon the academic life, but over the years he was to become a kind of guru or sounding-board for Lane. ‘I was almost an archetype of the audience he was after,’ he later wrote. ‘But I was an articulate archetype, so he could learn more because I could talk to him about it.’ He remembered Lane ‘sitting in his chauffeur-driven car, and he would talk in the most extraordinarily innocent way about ideas and society and so on’. In Hoggart’s opinion, Lane ‘needed to be in contact with people whose insights he respected, who seemed to know things he didn’t know about intellectual, social or cultural life’: looking back on Lane thirty years after his death, Hoggart saw him as a man driven on by a spirit of rebellion, who wanted to reach readers not by diluting or over-simplifying but through an Orwellian belief in the virtues of ‘clear, firm speech’ – and ‘today, when the very existence of a “common reader” is denied, this splendid conviction needs to be assessed afresh’.
Despite Lane’s bias towards non-publishers, it seemed more likely that an heir-apparent might be found among the younger generation of Penguin editors, then in their mid-twenties. John Curtis had already been with the firm five years when Dieter Pevsner and Tom Maschler joined in 1958, and all three went on to become well-known figures in the trade. The son of Nikolaus, Dieter Pevsner joined from university and went on to make his mark as a non-fiction editor, looking after a new generation of Penguin Specials and Pelicans on politics, psychology, archaeology, religion and history, while John Curtis, in true Penguin fashion, combined his editorial labours with publicity and design before moving on to Weidenfeld & Nicolson; but whereas Pevsner would remain with the firm for the rest of Lane’s life, Maschler shot through like a comet, presaging a future that Lane would find hard to accept and making a greater impact on the firm than his brief tenure might suggest.
Lean, dark and endowed with vulpine good looks, a devotee of corduroy jackets, open-necked shirts and slip-on shoes at a time when publishing offices were staffed by men in fiery tweeds or, in Penguin’s case, grey suits, white shirts and unalarming ties, Maschler was to become the most stylish and charismatic publisher of his generation, whose imprimatur was coveted by authors and venerated by literary agents, newspapermen, television producers, booksellers, literary editors and even the odd member of the reading public; a few years later, by which time he had converted an ailing Jonathan Cape into the most modish and sought-after imprint in literary London, a journalist wrote of how, when Maschler turned up at a publishing party, the room stiffened as if a wolf had been let loose in a flock of sheep. He was in his mid-twenties when he came to Penguin. His father, Kurt Maschler, was a publisher who had come to Britain from Berlin to escape the Nazis, and was well known as a publisher of art books and children’s books. Tom Maschler had decided against going to university, and after a brief spell with André Deutsch had moved on to MacGibbon & Kee. There he had edited a collection of essays entitled Declaration, which brought him a certain réclame in the literary world: its contributors ncluded John Osborne, Kenneth Tynan, Colin Wilson, John Wain, Lindsay Anderson, Doris Lessing and other writers of the Angry Young Man school, and it went on to sell some 20,000 copies in hardback. Lane must have heard about Declaration; if not, Maschler was drawn to his attention by the formidable Blanche Knopf, who described her protégé as ‘the most brilliant young man I had seen in a very long time’.
Despite his youth and relative inexperience, Maschler displayed an enviable insouciance in his dealings with Lane: so much so that it seemed as though he was interviewing Lane for a job, rather than vice versa. ‘I wonder whether you could telephone me at my office and let me know where and when I could reach you, since I would prefer to discuss the matter personally with you,’ he told his future employer. Paul Scherer, then working on the sales side, remembered how after Maschler had joined the phone rang in the middle of a meeting. Lane picked it up. ‘I thought I said I wasn’t taking any calls,’ he told the switchboard operator, but to no avail. In due course the receiver was passed to Lane’s most junior editor. ‘Oh, hello, darling,’ Maschler began, before embarking on a long and amorous conversation: Scherer likes to think that he lay on the floor at the time, but this could be wishful thinking.
Bill Williams may have reported Maschler as working ‘with more ardour than direction’, but Lane recognized and valued his qualities, and he quickly began to make his mark. He was, nominally, Frostie’s editorial assistant, buying in new fiction; but she was hardly ever in the office – Maschler claims that she never came into the office at all during his two years at Penguin, but was seldom off the phone – and before long he was dabbling in foreign rights, looking after the play list, building up a line of authors in translation, and trying to persuade Lane to engage in the kind of co-edition publishing pioneered by his father. He soon discovered that for all her assiduity and the books she humped across London, Frostie was hopelessly out of touch with younger writers of the age and type he had published in Declaration, and was taking too long to make up her mind about books submitted to the firm: ‘You’ve only had it so far for two years and six weeks!’ Hilary Rubinstein complained apropos Nadine Gordimer’s The Lying Days, on offer from Gollancz. Penguin had turned down Amis’s Lucky Jim; Lane himself had cast a cold eye on such ‘doubtful starters’ as Catcher in the Rye and Brian Moore’s The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne; and when Maschler reported back on a meeting with André Deutsch about books he might buy for the Penguin list, Frostie’s reaction was entirely negative: V. S. Naipaul’s The Suffrage of Elvira had already been rejected, with no chance of an appeal, George Mikes was out of the question (‘No – rejected’), and Maschler’s special pleading on behalf of Brian Moore’s The Feast of Lupercal (‘Do we really want to turn this down?’) fell on deaf ears. But all was not in vain. He outraged Hamish Hamilton by turning down the latest Angela Thirkell, took on David Storey, William Golding’s Lord of the Flies and John Braine’s best-selling Room at the Top, and, making good use of his European connections, translations of Camus, Sartre, Brecht and Musil. He also revived the ailing play list: a keen habitué of the Royal Court, and a friend of Tynan, Tony Richardson and George Devine, he stretched his remit to include original work as well as reprints and published new plays by the new school of ‘kitchen sink’ dramatists such as Arnold Wesker and Bernard Kops under the imprint of New English Dramatists: the first volume sold over 200,000 copies, and the covers were decorated with interlinking triangles of colour, reminiscent of G-Plan furniture or the modern Danish kitchenware promoted in the 1950s by Estrid Bannister. For the time being at least, Lane was infatuated by his new appointment, whose irreverence and scorn for the accepted wisdom reflected his own: Maschler was a regular visitor to Silverbeck, he went with Lane to Switzerland to interview graphic artists for a possible series of illustrated books, and even Bill Williams ruefully noted ‘how easily the impact of poor Frostie has dissolved’, and that ‘the cleaning-up operation was both desirable and overdue’.
Much to Lane’s irritation, Maschler’s stay at Penguin was all too brief. Early in 1960, Lane was diagnosed with jaundice and whipped off to the Edward VII Hospital in Windsor. While recuperating, he was visited by Tom Maschler, who told him that he would be giving in his notice since he had been offered a job in publishing which it would be madness to decline. He could not, he wrote to Lane afterwards, tell him which firm he was joining since this would ‘embarrass the publisher enormously should it be discovered at this point’; but all would be revealed in due course, and in the meantime he would like to recommend in his place a friend named Tony Godwin. Infuriated as he was to lose a potential heir-apparent – ‘Well. What am I going to do?’ he demanded when Maschler broke the news – Lane agreed to see Godwin, despite some reservations about his being a bookseller without publishing experience. He already knew him, both in person and by reputation, as a bookseller, and Charles Pick of Michael Joseph had warmly recommended him as a possible Penguin editor. Maschler drove a nervous Godwin down to the hospital for his initial interview, and departed to contemplate his future as an editorial director of Jonathan Cape.
A small, wiry, energetic figure with bright blue eyes, Godwin was then about forty. In later years he was invariably togged out in an open-necked shirt and jeans, topped by a bush of frizzy grey hair, but in those days he was a more clerkly figure, clad in a sober grey suit and smoking cigarettes through a holder. In the late Thirties he had worked for Gordon Fraser in Paris, which gave him a lifelong interest in modern painting. During the war he had served in an artillery regiment, rising to captain and seeing action in Italy and Normandy. Demobbed in 1946, and lacking a university degree and formal qualifications, he sold books off a barrow – as did his contemporary Paul Hamlyn, at exactly the same time – before deciding to open a bookshop. He borrowed £2,000 from friends, and opened Better Books in the Charing Cross Road.
Twenty years earlier, Allen Lane had complained about the dowdy exclusivity of English bookshops; Better Books was deliberately un-dowdy, but although Godwin made a point of employing literate assistants who knew what he had in stock, and promoted poetry readings, coffee-drinking and the like, Better Books might well have alarmed middlebrow book-lovers. John Sewell painted an imitation Matisse fascia board; Ronald Searle and others drew and designed the advertisements that appeared in the Tube, the Arts Theatre programmes and the New Statesman; the basement was decorated in unbooksellerish hues of silver and black. Fired by his success, Godwin acquired another bookshop in the City, and in 1959 he was asked to work his magic on Bumpus. The quintessential ‘carriage trade’ bookseller, Bumpus had been run since the 1920s by the venerable and much-loved J. G. Wilson. It had recently been taken over by a consortium of publishers, including Allen Lane, Robert Lusty of Hutchinson, Alan White of Methuen and Jocelyn (Jock) Gibb, a benign and heavily tweeded gentleman publisher of the old school who shared Lane’s passion for farming, and spent much of his time in the office telephoning the bailiffs on his farms in Scotland and discussing milk yields with his baffled employees. Godwin inherited fifty employees, many of them over seventy years old, customers’ accounts which had not been settled since the early 1930s, and losses of £1,800 a month. Faced with such horrors, he moved the shop from Oxford Street round the corner into Baker Street – not a wise move, since under the terms of the lease he was not allowed to hang out a sign or a fascia board – sacked most of the staff, bought the Book Society, and edited and redesigned its magazine, The Bookman.
Godwin’s bedside interview with Lane must have gone well, for – much to the surprise of their colleagues at Bumpus, none of whom had been consulted by Lane, their fellow-director, or their ebullient employee – it was announced that he would be joining Penguin in an editorial capacity forthwith, and that he would continue working for Bumpus and the Book Society until September 1960. Reporting that Penguin was in ‘disarray’ after Maschler’s departure, Lane announced that Godwin would begin by ‘picking up some of the threads’ from his predecessor, but this was not good enough for the new arrival. Godwin was not pleased by a piece in the Bookseller which reported that he was replacing Maschler as ‘an editor at Penguin Books’. ‘I feel this was a bit much,’ he complained to his new boss: he thought he had been taken on to replace Eunice Frost, whereas Maschler was ‘on a par with Ditta [i.e. Dieter Pevsner: spelling was never Godwin’s strong point] and the other young editors’, and such an announcement would not help him in his dealings with hardback editors, literary agents and the like. Lane confided to Frostie that he had had ‘a bit of a bleat’ from Godwin, who felt it would be ‘a retrograde step to move from MD of Bumpus into Tom’s shoes’. Godwin, in the meantime, wrote Lane a memo in which he stressed the importance of maintaining Penguin’s standards and providing ‘paperbacks for the literate’: it was essential not to allow the firm’s ‘unique role and identity to be diluted by the demands of sales’, but it was equally important, if Penguin was not to lose out to its brasher rivals in terms of display and shelf space, that the sales and marketing side of the business should be developed and expanded. ‘You know, the best day’s business I ever did was hiring Tony Godwin,’ Lane informed Charles Pick later that year at the Frankfurt Book Fair. A few years later, he would be singing a different tune; but for the time being at least the future looked rosy.
Lane was equally euphoric about another new appointment made at this time. Whereas Godwin, like Lane himself, had worked his way up from the bottom, C. M. Woodhouse was the quintessence of what Henry Fairlie had recently termed the ‘Establishment’, and the kind of man whom Lane had hitherto shunned as a possible colleague. The heir to a peerage, educated at Winchester and New College, Oxford, with a good war behind him – he had been parachuted into Greece and blown up the all-important Gorgopotamos viaduct, severely disrupting supplies to Rommel’s forces in North Africa – ‘Monty’ Woodhouse was an old-fashioned, liberal-minded, scholarly public servant who combined his duties as a Conservative MP with writing, reviewing and a devotion to modern Greece. He had been introduced to Lane by Alan Pryce-Jones, Stanley Morison’s successor as editor of the Times Literary Supplement, and had little experience of business and none whatsoever of publishing.
For whatever reason, Lane saw Woodhouse as a potential right-hand man, albeit one who came into the office on a part-time basis and would combine publishing with his parliamentary duties. ‘I am more sure than ever that he is the right man,’ Lane informed Frostie, and George Weidenfeld was reported as telling New York publishers that Woodhouse had taken over the running of Penguin: but the honeymoon was brief. A bad start was made when Lane complained that, with Maschler’s departure, the other editors at a sales conference chaired by Woodhouse ‘said their pieces like a group of boys at school’: Woodhouse bridled on their behalf, pointing out that ‘the criticism would have been more justified if you had given me any idea beforehand of what you did expect’. A month or two after taking up the reins, Woodhouse was complaining that the job was far bigger than expected, and the machine a good deal less smooth-running. He was heavily involved in a Finance Bill and a Standing Committee, and found it impossible to give more time to the firm; Lane complained that Woodhouse had failed to brief himself adequately for the spring sales conference, and that it was impossible for him to do a proper job running the editorial department on three days a week. ‘In the circumstances, I think it would be better if you made other plans as from the autumn,’ Lane memoed his new colleague. ‘I have no comment on your decision,’ Woodhouse replied. ‘I would like to put on record that, according to my diary, there have only been four working days since Easter on which I did not spend at least half the day, generally more, either at Harmondsworth or at Holborn’ (where Penguin had, briefly, a small London office above an ironmonger’s shop).
Tony Godwin remembered Woodhouse as ‘one of the nicest men I’ve ever met’, albeit one who was ‘addicted to gentle civil service procedures and a dyed-in-the-wool conservative’, and noted how Lane failed to hide ‘a terrible courteous impatience for the poor sweet man’; Tom Maschler’s only recorded comment was a laconic P. G.?’ scrawled against his superior’s name, and only a year or two after Woodhouse’s departure Lane referred to him as ‘the governmental type whose name escapes me’.
Woodhouse’s tenure at Penguin was, as he ruefully admitted in his memoirs, ‘brief and uneasy’. While in Ghana on parliamentary business he had been told by an indignant reader that the words ‘Not for Sale in the USA or Canada’, printed on the back of the Penguin edition of Stanley Kaufmann’s novel The Philanderer, somehow suggested that Penguin was unloading pornography on the African market; on his return to England he had suggested more ‘emollient’ wording might be in order, and this, he concluded, ‘was the sum total of my success with Allen Lane’. His only other recorded contribution to Penguin history was to express some reservations, as voiced by some junior members of staff, about the desirability of publishing the unexpurgated version of D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Lane, he recalled, ‘was furious, and told me to mind my own business’: which was just as well, perhaps, since Lady Chatterley was about to make a fortune for Penguin and its founder, and attract more attention than any book ever published by the firm.