Allen Lane

Description of the book (Amazon):

The founding of Penguin Books in 1935 revolutionized the publishing industry with the idea that great writing ought to be made available for the price of a pack of cigarettes. In telling the story of Penguin and its founder, Allen Lane, Jeremy Lewis traces the changes the company wrought in cultural and political life in England and in the publishing industry worldwide, from the publication of Ulysses, with its attendant obscenity trial, to the Penguin Specials that alerted prewar Britain to the Nazi threat. Rich with anecdote and suffused with Lane’s larger-than-life personality, Penguin Special touches on the entire twentieth century in its portrait of a man and a company that have changed the way the English-speaking world reads.

Wikipedia:

Sir Allen Lane CH (born Allen Lane Williams; 21 September 1902 – 7 July 1970) was a British publisher who together with his brothers Richard and John Lane founded Penguin Books in 1935, bringing high-quality paperback fiction and non-fiction to the mass market.

. . .Most booksellers and authors were against the idea of paperbacks. They believed that paperbacks would result in individuals spending less money on books. Lane was very stubborn when it came to his company; he operated mainly on intuition and imagination. “He thrived in an atmosphere of crisis and came most fully alive under the challenge of great dilemmas.” He was a creative genius that once he had an idea he would not stop until it came to fruition. Once he decided on creating paperbacks he set about in deciding what the books should look like and finding a name. He had decided that the books would be reprints so he also needed to approach other publishers to see if they and their authors would be willing to sublease the rights of the books. He was quoted as saying, “I have never been able to understand why cheap books should not also be well designed, for good design is no more expensive than bad.”

The Letterpress Project – ‘Penguin Special: The Life and Times of Allen Lane by Jeremy Lewis’, June 19, 2023:

It is hard to believe that Jeremy Lewis’s magisterial biography of Allen Lane and the publishing house he founded, Penguin Books, is already eighteen years old. It is even harder to believe that Lewis is no longer with us: he died in 2017 aged just 75. I’ve just reread his book and I think was even more impressed this time than I was on first reading – albeit with two very slight reservations.

Obviously, this is a book that will only really appeal to those who are interested in Lane and the paperback revolution – one should perhaps more accurately say the reading revolution – he was largely responsible for. But to anyone who has grown up reading Penguins and for whom these little paperbacks have constituted a cultural education, Lewis’s book will be both fascinating and indispensable. 

If, however – and this is the first of my slight reservations – your primary interest in Penguin books is their design, then this is an area that the book is less satisfactory on. It does cover key issues of design and appearance over the years but does this generally without the benefit of illustrations, which rather assumes that the reader will already be familiar with what Lewis is talking about. Those most interested in the aesthetics of Penguin books may find Puffin By Design: 70 Years of Imagination 1940-2010 by Phil Baines (reviewed here) and Penguin by Illustrators (reviewed here) more informative. But for sheer, abundant historical detail, Lewis’s is the book to read: it is unlikely that it will ever be surpassed.

Allen Lane began his publishing career in the 1920s at The Bodley Head, a very old school ‘gentleman publisher’ type of company started by his uncle; in fact, although it was where Lane learnt the trade, it was also in many regards precisely the kind of publishing house he saw himself as being in revolt against. Prompted by being unable to find anything but trashy romances and adventure stories in the station news kiosks during a long train journey when he had forgotten to take a book with him, Lane had the vision of publishing the very best that literature had to offer in well-produced paperbacks for the price of a packet of cigarettes – sixpence, as it was then (2.5 pence in today’s money). This, he believed, would put great literature within the reach of everyone who aspired to read it. While paperbacks were not a new idea – European publishers had produced them for years – the almost missionary zeal Lane brought to his endeavour was revolutionary. And it would succeed beyond his wildest dreams.

The pre-war years, when Penguin was essentially a family business – Lane and his two brothers were its original owner-directors – are fascinating in their pungent, atmospheric detail of a long-vanished business world and a long-lost London. For example, Penguin’s first London warehouse where books were stored and orders were picked and packed was the unheated crypt of Holy Trinity Church, Marylebone Road. After a few years there Lane felt he should have a proper lavatory installed to replace the communal bucket. An officer from the local council came to inspect the crypt and in horror said that if anyone ever asked him he would deny any knowledge of the place. It was this that would eventually result in the first major physical expansion of the firm – the building of a custom-designed warehouse at Harmondsworth in Middlesex.

Lane left school at sixteen and prided himself on his ‘middlebrow tastes’. His expertise in choosing books for the Penguin imprint – and this would stretch to thousands of titles selling tens of millions of copies – appears to have been largely instinctive, a combination of fanatical attention to detail, absolute dedication to literary excellence, and bluff, no nonsense commercial acumen. That Lane harnessed these qualities so benignly in the service of quality publishing is our good fortune. It is now widely recognised that his lifetime publishing achievements have had a positive impact on countless millions around the globe and he is regarded by many as one of the great educators.