posted on 19 Jun 2023

Penguin Special: The Life and Times of Allen Lane by Jeremy Lewis

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.

In person, however, he was not an entirely benign figure. He may have had the appearance of a dapper, well-groomed ‘yeoman farmer’ (and indeed did become something of gentleman farmer in his later, wealthier years), but he was a ruthless, unsentimental operator notorious for his meanness (as well as his occasional, bewildering generosity), for his manipulative behaviour towards people – including a tendency to rely on ‘hatchet men’ to do the dirty work of disposing of lieutenants who fell from favour – and perhaps most of all for a buccaneering independence and an abhorrence of anything that smacked of red tape, committees or officialdom. Anything, in fact, that might stand between Lane and his intended goal.

I was interested to see that reviewing the book on its original publication the great memoirist and literary editor Diana Athill urged readers to savour it slowly: “It is so richly stuffed with facts, people, perceptions and atmosphere,” she wrote, “that you may get indigestion if you do not allow it the time it deserves.” 

She is as usual absolutely right. Lewis’s prose style – and this is my other slight reservation – makes few concessions to ease of reading. By this, I do not mean that the book is badly written; quite the reverse. But Lewis favours long and to my mind not always entirely graceful sentences that sometimes seem over-stuffed with subordinate clauses and I lost count of the number of passages I had to reread because I had allowed my attention to wander. 

Anyway, if Lewis’s subject does appeal to you, then on no account miss Penguin Special. It gives a vivid, living impression of the evolving nature of the company over the nearly forty years between its founding and Lane’s death in 1970. But do heed Athill’s advice to savour rather than gobble: it is a wonderful book and every moment spent with it is richly rewarding. 

 

Alun Severn

June 2023

 

Books about Penguin elsewhere on Letterpress:

This post has around a dozen links at the end to articles on various aspects of Penguin books.