And you’d be right as this was back in the autumn of 1934 when, as the story goes, a certain Allen Lane had been a weekend guest at Agatha Christie’s and was faced with the above dilemma at Exeter Station. I would probably bought a shoddy discount book but Lane didn’t. He got on the London train and spent his time thinking about what had just happened.I’m condensing the next bit but during that journey and during subsequent conversations with his two brothers they realised that the rapid expansion of the middle class in the time up to the 30s had created a very large group of people with the money to spend on books and the leisure time in which to read them. Basically the people who now commuted to work.
world famous Penguin Books logo
The three Lane brothers had all been born with the family name Williams, the sons of Samuel Williams and Camilla Lane, who was a cousin of the London publisher John Lane senior, the managing partner of The Bodley Head who had married late in life and had no children; in 1919, he therefore invited Allen Williams, then aged 16, to join the Bodley Head, on the proviso that he changed his name to Lane. Consequently, the whole Williams family changed their name to Williams-Lane in April 1919. Allan Lane was invited to join the board of The Bodley Head in 1924 and he gradually took control of the company. The two younger Williams-Lane brothers also eventually joined The Bodley Head.Apparently the normal routine at the house they shared in Talbot Square, London was that the brothers had a morning ritual of sharing the bathroom. Allen in the bath while Richard shaved and John sat on the toilet seat and chatted, before they rotated.But in 1934 Bodley Head were in financial difficulties so when they did get to work in The Bodley Head’s office in Vigo Street, they needed to come up with a plan to save the company. The brothers had been aware of the successful Albatross imprint of paperback books, printed in English, that had been established in Hamburg in Germany in 1932. The Albatross books were for sale to English language readers in continental Europe, and were designed to be attractive, partly due to their meeting the ‘Golden Mean’ ratio defined by Leonardo da Vinci, (they measured 181 x 111 mm), were colour-coded for content (green for travel, red for crime, orange for fiction, etc) and were sold in covers designed with a logo and typography.After much discussion the brothers, together with a few of their Bodley Head staff, came up with the idea of Penguin books, learning and borrowing much from the Albatross imprint. They copied the use of color coding, plain typography and an avian logo on the cover of the books. Their code was orange for fiction, green for crime, blue for biography, cerise for travel, red for plays, gray for world affairs, yellow for miscellaneous, and violet for essays and ‘belles lettres'.
evolution of the Penguin logo as first devised by Edward Young
It is also not clear precisely who came up with the choice of ‘Penguin’ as the imprint title; some say that it was Allan Lane’s secretary. It is clear that one of the staff, Edward Young, who was to become the first production manager at Penguin Books, was dispatched to London Zoo in Regents Park to sketch the penguins in their relatively new enclosure and to come up with a logo. On his return, he said the penguins were rather smelly.The big idea was to go big or go home. They would produce a new series of affordable, nicely produced paperbacks that contained high quality literary works, and they would aim to sell enough of them that the price could remain low without the series making a loss. Allen was absolutely committed to the cover price being only sixpence, believing that a good book should cost the same as a packet of ten cigarettes.
Penguin Book dispenser
Richard Lane did the arithmetic and came up with a formula that worked at a royalty of one farthing per copy to the copyright holder. With an initial print run of 20,000 copies, the enterprise could break even at 17,000 copies sold at 6d., assuming the production and distribution costs remained stable at about 2 1/2 d. With the book retailer getting 2d per book, Penguin books would receive just over 1d per book sold. Further impressions (reprints) of each book would yield greater profits, because much of the cost of production had been covered by the first 17,000 copies.One of the key aims was to sell the books in places that hadn’t sold books before. For example. Woolworth’s but its chief buyer Clifford Prescott, an American, was not impressed by Lane’s initial pitch. Their meeting was interrupted by Prescott’s wife who saw Lane’s Penguins spread across the table. She said she’d buy a couple each week when they cost just six pence each. Prescott listened to his better half and ordered 63,500 books from Penguin.The first ten Penguins were 6 orange novels, two green crime books (a Dorothy Sayers and an Agatha Christie) and 2 blue biographies. The original Agatha Christie title “The Mysterious Affair at Styles“, had to be replaced by “Murder on the Links” due to a misunderstanding over copyright ownership.
Ariel was Penguin Number 1. The English copyright was already conveniently held by The Bodley Head. The copyright of six of the ten first Penguins was held by the publisher Jonathan Cape, a good friend of Allen Lane. He is famously quoted by his biographer Michael S Howard as saying that he was certain that the Penguin venture would fail, and so thought that he would take 400 pounds from Allan Lane for the copyrights, before Penguin was declared to be bankrupt.Within a year, Penguin had sold 3 million paperbacks and it was split off from the Bodley Head to be its own standalone publisher.Some of the above information was gleaned from the very, very wonderful BBC radio series ‘Shedunnit’ by Caroline Crampton. You’ll find it on BBC Sounds. A treasure trove of information about the Golden Age of Crime. Here’s a link: https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/brand/p0c3gky2
I mentioned at the start about the shoddy books being dumped. This week, a poem about how they were sometimes used.
Derek’s Bookstall, Preston Market
New York from Liverpool
with a mixed cargo
dirty November weather
and orders from the owner
for a quick turn round
Stevedores take cover
in the empty hold
jabbing points about
Dempsey’s next fight
till an agent calls a load
to make the tide.
From his bridge of books
another Derek ends the tale
a sharp wind ignored
as a flask is raised
to the Derek that started it all
more than eighty years ago
just a man passing
the Albert Edward Dock
as a ship discarded Atlantic weight
a man who had the wit to know
that books could be more than ballast.
First published in Orbis, May 2012Thanks for reading, Terry Q.
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