Penguin’s pioneering publisher - who never read books . By Florence Waters Allen Lane, the founder of the Penguin paperback, is one of our country’s greatest populist educators. He was both brilliant and normal, a charismatic bore, a man who “never turned the page of a book” (his own words), yet was passionate about getting people to read. He changed publishing 75 years ago when he started selling good books for the price of a packet of cigarettes.
If anyone can flesh out the contradictory figure of Lane, it’s the writer Michael Morpurgo, who attempts just that in a fascinating Radio 4 programme. Morpurgo met Lane’s eldest daughter, Clare, in Corfu in 1963 and, at the age of 19, married her. He knew his father-in-law for seven difficult years (“Tensions finally melted in the last year”) before Lane died of cancer. “He wasn’t happy about the marriage, so it was a challenge. If only I had known then how interesting a challenge it was to be,” Morpurgo tells me. With him when we speak is Clare, who recounts happy childhood tales: a party in their Middlesex garden organised by her father at which a baby elephant appeared; and a cycling trip across France with just her father and DK Broster’s novel The Flight of the Heron: “My father didn’t read but, somehow, he could produce from his pocket exactly the right book at the right time.” Lane published DH Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, which sold 2.1 million copies in its first year. “He was a terrier snapping at the establishment,” Morpurgo says. Yet years later, the same man stole out in the dark to empty a Penguin warehouse full of books of French illustrations and burn them, because he’d decided they were sacrilegious. . Pelican Books Lane expanded the business in 1937 with the publication of George Bernard Shaw's The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism and Capitalism under the Pelican Books imprint, an imprint designed to educate the reading public rather than entertain. Recognising his own limitations Lane appointed V. K. Krishna Menon as the first commissioning edition of the series, supported by an advisory panel consisting of Peter Chalmers Mitchell, H. L. Bales and W. E. Williams. Several thousand Pelicans were published over the next half-century and brought high quality accounts of the current state of knowledge in many fields, often written by authors of specialised academic books.(The Pelican series, in decline for several years, was finally discontinued in 1984.) It all began with the Lane brothers, Richard, Allen and John, zestful and filled with what they thought was a great idea. They launched a publishing firm, Penguin Books, to publish soft-cover reprints of contemporary "classics" at a very low price. There were three types of these: novels, in orange and white jackets; detective stories, in green and white; and popular biographies, in blue and white. Most of the established English publishing houses took an extremely dim view of this venture. It was true, they said, that soft-cover books had previously been published in Eng- land, when people wanted a slender volume they could slip into their pockets on a trip via that modern means of trans- portation, the railway. They recalled "The Run and Read Library," "The Railway Library" and "The Travellers' Li- brary." But that had been long ago. In the twentieth century people wanted hard-cover books which they could show on their drawing-room shelves and also, occasionally, read. They would not buy flimsy paperbacks. The Lane brothers did not have much to lose and so they decided to try just the same. They published reprints, such as Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms, Andre Maurois' Ariel, ou la vie de Shelley (in English translation) ; and Eric Linklater's Poet's Pub. The print orders were very small at first, but then they began to rise. 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 nonfiction field, and to publish not only reprints but also original works by big names. This was all very well, but the publishers needed some as- surance that important schools and other organizations would take note of this venture. Krishna Menon had by then lined up an impressive number of contacts, not only in the political but also in the educational world, contacts which the three enterprising Englishmen lacked as yet. So he introduced the Lanes to influential fellow Britishers whom he knew, and who could be of some help. Among these were the secretary of the British Institute of Adult Education, W. E. Williams, and H. L. Beales, an influential faculty member of Krishna Menon's own alma mater, the London School of Economics. They agreed that the books envisioned by Krishna Menon would be useful in adult education not the least reason for this being their drastically reduced price and that therefore they would be ready to lend a hand. This is how the Pelican series of the Penguins came into existence. Krishna Menon became its general editor. The bang with which Krishna Menon started the Pelicans resounded in the publishing world. Among his first tides, starting with 1937, was a book by George Bernard Shaw. The title of the original volume was The Intelligent Woman! s Guide to Socialism. (A Tory author countered with The Socialist Woman's Guide to Intelligence.) Krishna Menon himself induced the terrible-tempered Mr. Shaw to add two new sections to the book one on sovietism, and the other on fascism. The early titles of the Pelicans reflected Krishna Menon's eclectic tastes. They included a reprint of one of his favorite books by Elie Halevy, A History of the English People ; Julian Huxley's Essays in Popular Science; Vision and Design, by the English painter and critic Roger Eliot Fry; Social Life in the Insect World, by Jean-Henri Fabre, the French entomologist; The Mysterious Universe, by Sir James Jeans; Literary Taste, by Arnold Bennett; and Civilization, by Clive Bell, the art and literary critic. Subsequent volumes included works by Harold Laski, Krishna Menon's idol; the unbelievably prolific H. G. Wells; Harold Nicolson, famed as a diplomat and author; Sir Nor- man Angell, Nobel Prize laureate; and Wickham Steed. By this time the Axis powers were throwing their weight around in the world Hitler's Germany, Mussolini's Italy, and the war lords' Japan. Krishna Menon waged his own cold war against them as the editor of the Pelicans. He published reprints of Blackmail or War?, by the "French Cassandra," Genevieve Tabouis, and Edgar Ansel Mowrer's Germany Puts the Clock Back. Altogether he seems to have edited some thirty books. Unbusinesslike Krishna Menon had no contract with the businesslike Lanes, and so their cooperation faded into a dense cloud of misunderstandings. On the occasion of the Silver Jubilee of the pioneering Penguin books, Sir Allen Lane, the managing director, noted: It was in the political field that we first commenced original publishing, when we found, somewhat to our surprise, a number of authors who were prepared to chance first publication of their books in paper covers at sixpence, with a royalty of a farthing a copy, in place of the more certain returns which pub- lication through normal channels would have ensured. . . . Thus began the great "paperback revolution" of the pub- lishing business in the twentieth century.