Bully's Book Club: Penguin Special: The Life and Times of Allen Lane

For somebody like me who loves books, there is nothing quite as delight-on-delight satisfying as a book about books: the Double-Stuf Oreo of publishing. I was chuffed as a chicken to come home from my Christmas London holiday with Penguin Special: The Life and Times of Allen Lane by Jeremy Lewis under my arm:—a big, detailed but brisk history of Penguin Books (and its founder Allen Lane): those little orange pocket paperbacks that changed the history of publishing forever when they were introduced in England in 1935. Like the BBC and the London Underground, Penguins are a quintessentially English innovation that as much defined the society of pre- and especially post-War Britain as they did the book trade.

It's not big secret to regular Bully-readers that when I'm not readin' comics or playin' hopscotch or doin' jigsaw puzzles or pettin' my kittycat, I run up and down the halls at a Certain Biggish New York Publishing Company and do my best to sell our books to the outside world so you can all read 'em. Suspend the conventional wisdom that I am six-and-a-half years old when I tell you I've been working in the publishing world for more years than you've had hot dinners (this month, at least), and after a while in the trenches of being a book rep on the road and in the busy busy offices you sometimes feel like you know most everything there is about the world of publishing. Well, think again, Buster! Or should I say, Bully, because not only was this the most entertaining book I brought home from my London sojourn, it's also the most educational. I learned more about my chosen career in the several days of "can't put it down" devouring of Penguin Special than I have in...well, let's not say how many years.

Publishing in pre-War Britain was a lot different. In those days, publishing was (as it still is, sorta) big business, but with books having a lot less competition for entertainment attention and a good deal more prestige in society: the goings-on of literary gurus and big-name publishers were regular fodder for the daily newspapers. Aside from Judith Regan, has that happened much in modern times? (A: It has not.) But it was a world in which books were more luxuries than necessities: priced at shillings rather than pence. Paperbacks existed, but poorly designed and printed, pricey, and—hampered by publishers fearing lost sales of their more expensive hardcover editions—they featured subjects often more scholarly than popular. Allen Lane (born into a publishing company family that ran the prestigious legacy firm The Bodley Head) didn't create the paperback, but he made it a product of his time: he came up with the concept of the accesible and affordable sixpenny paperback, a book line that could appeal to all classes and economic backgrounds without sacrificing design standards, legibility, or entertainment potential. Sounds like a sure thing, right?

Easier said than done. Derided by naysayers and rival publishers, the immense risk Lane took in introduce a line of exceptionally inexpensive pocket-sized paperbacks might have been a massive bust, but instead created a boom in the industry that (eventually) all publishers would race to copy. Jeffrey Lewis has some wonderful anecdotes of how the venture nearly failed before being saved by Woolworth's shops, who ordered enough of the first batch of Penguins to save the firm—and who sold enough to make them the smash hit they became.

The most amazing thing about this orange-spined success story is how it likely could not have happened in any other stretch of history: Penguin Books were a "perfect storm" that caught the zeitgeist and capitalized on the twentieth century's massive sweeping changes in culture and society: a growing middle class following The Great War, the movement towards inexpensive and value-for-money entertainment during the lean years of the Blitz, the need to disseminate political and social warnings about Hitler and socialism to a large populace, the slow but distinct dissolve of the barriers between the upper, middle, and lower classes during the Second World War where different social levels huddled in air raid shelters or went off to the front lines together, the post-War period quest for self-improvement and a thirst for knowledge to bring about the Golden Albion promised by politicians: all of these were perfect fuel for a paperback novel or non-fiction book; all of these contributed to the expansion of Penguin into art, childrens', history, philosophy and world literature lines that still are regarded with awe and respect even in this age of mass publishing.

It's also a tale of a Golden Age past and done with: with little competition for entertainment to the masses aside from the all-popular wireless BBC programmes, reading commanded a larger percentage of consumer attention and spending than it does today. Lewis describes one of Lane's ultra-successful publishing events called "The Millions": Penguin reissued ten classic works by major authors at a time, in print runs of 100,000 each. Shaw, Waugh, D. H. Lawrence, Agatha Christie and Georges Simenon, among others, all got their own "Millions" promotion. Let me repeat that reprint figure, okay: One. Hundred. Thousand. Each. Keep in mind these were not ten new books but reprints of long-available Penguin paperbacks. Nowadays most reissues of paperbacks can have difficulty topping 5,000 in a print run, and you seldom want to risk overwhelming booksellers or consumers by bringing out more than a handful or reissues by one author at a time, so was Lane's plan successful? Bloody yes:

[Lane's] pleasure was still greater when, on the day of publication, the manager of W. H. Smith's in Baker Street rang to say that a seemingly interminable queue building up outside his shop did not consist of stranded commuters but eager buyers of Bernard Shaw. The Million sold out in six weeks.

Good gravy. That was a different, different world indeed.

There's wonderful characters from British modern history and the book world in here: Bernard Shaw and Agatha Christie were especial close friends of the firm and of Allen Lane, as well as delicious literary gossip that makes for fun "ah ha" moments: upset with what he felt was pedestrian treatment from his publisher The Bodley Head, Oscar Wilde named a dull butler character in The Importance of Being Earnest after Allen Lane's uncle John Lane. The details are incisive and the history is in-depth, all based on personal and company papers opened specially for this book, as well as interviews with remaining surviving early Penguin personnel. There's some wonderful sweeping bits in here about the looming presence of the American publishing juggernaut that would eventually threaten Penguin and change their long-running typography-only covers into paperbacks with artwork on the cover (loathed by Lane; he called American firm Pocket Books "Porno Books" for their lurid covers).

It's educational, too. Whether or not you're in the business of publishing, you'll learn a heck of a lot about the trade and how it works—or more accurately, worked, though Lane's hard-earned and strictly-adhered-to lessons in the book trade are still of value to publishers today (who sometimes ignore history at their own peril):

[Lane] went on to say that word of mouth was the most effective way to make a bestseller, and that books should only be advertised if they were being talked about...Lane would always regard expensive publicity as a waste of good money.

Jeremy Lewis writes with a wonderful tongue-in-cheek style, breezy and fast-paced, often with tart dry humor tucked in the middle of a seemingly-innocuous sentence:

An ex-marine, [Lane's butler] Knight lived in nearby Praed Street: he made tea in the morning, ran the all-important bath, cooked breakfast and an evening meal specializing in steak and kidney pies, did the housework and claimed, misleadingly, to be teetotal.

or

Adprint favored a firm in the Sudetenland, hardly the most suitable venue in 1938.

or

[A] party was held in the garden behind Pevsner's office in Gower Street in July 1949 to celebrate the fiftieth King Penguin: some penguins were brought in from the Zoo, one of which lost control and savaged a guest.

Do I recommend Penguin Special? Heck yeah, with bells on. Two hooves up. It's the most entertaining book I've read this year (and I read a bucketload) and it's likely to stay with me as a wonderful and colorful portrait of the publishing world. (You can buy it from Amazon.com using the link on the right, or order it direct from England using Amazon.co.uk: the UK edition'll run you about thirteen buckets plus five to seven dollars shipping, but you may get it a little faster than waiting for Amazon.com to find or import a copy for you.) If you're not working in the book world you'll enjoy it as a business success story, solid British history filled with colorful characters...but if you spend your days writing, or selling books, or publishing 'em...well, this book is about as close as you'll get to somebody throwing a party for your way of life and helping you to see it in a new light and appreciation for its history. After many years of being a publishers' sales rep, I was especially taken by this delightful portrait of an early working Allen Lane:

He enjoyed the cameraderie of the trade, the drinks and the gossip; like all the best publishers, he had a good memory for books published by rival firms as well as by The Bodley Head, and, without necessarily reading more than a page or two, had a shrewd sense of what books would, or would not, suit particular shops and buyers. His convivality, his readiness to combine business with pleasure, and his dashing good looks made him a popular figure in the trade; he thought most bookshops dreary and offputting, but his understanding of and liking for booksellers themselves—not always shared by the grander or more literary type of publisher, uneasy in the company of tradesmen—was to serve him well in the years ahead....Thirty years on, writing to thank an old colleague who had written to congratulate him on his knighthood, Lane looked back with a certain nostalgia. 'It is a far cry', he wrote, 'from the days when you and I traipsed the city streets trying to sell a few books, but I not sure that wasn't the about the happiest period of my life.'

When I am an old and grey and shaggy bull who's put in my full time at the firm and I'm ready to retire to my green fields, I can only wish for such an epitaph: he loved books. He loved publishing books. He loved selling books. And in the end, who wouldn't?