Sir Allen Lane(1902–1970)

Allen Lane Williams was born at Cotham, Bristol, on the twenty-first of September 1902, eldest son of Samuel Williams, a small Bristol manufacturer, and Camilla Lane. The maternal uncle John Lane was a leading London publisher (founder in 1887 of the Bodley Head, the avant-garde literary press that had published Oscar Wilde's Salomé, the original Yellow Book of Aubrey Beardsley, and the principal Aesthetic-and-decadent literature of the 1890s); when Allen left Bristol Grammar School at sixteen in 1919 without a leaving certificate, John Lane took him into the Bodley Head as a junior trainee, on the condition that he change his surname from Williams to Lane. He spent the next sixteen years at the Bodley Head, served as Chairman from 1925 on his uncle's death in his twenty-third year, and through the late 1920s and early 1930s built the Bodley Head's growing James Joyce and Agatha Christie lists.

In June 1934, in his thirty-second year, returning by train from a weekend at Agatha Christie's house in Devon, he could find nothing of literary quality to buy at the Exeter St Davids station bookstall (only the standard collection of railway-bookstall ephemera, cheap thrillers, and the seven-and-sixpenny hardback novels that were beyond the means of the casual traveller). He worked out on the train back to London the proposition that became the founding business model of the modern English-language paperback: the great works of contemporary literature, in good paper-covered editions, at sixpence the volume (the price of a packet of cigarettes), distributed not through the bookshops but through Woolworth's and the railway-station bookstalls.

He brought the proposition to the Bodley Head board, which rejected it on the unanimous opinion of his fellow directors that sixpence paperbacks were impossible at any margin and would in any case devalue the hardback trade on which the firm's revenue depended. He committed his own personal capital and the small inheritance from his uncle, took separate office space at the crypt of Holy Trinity Church on Marylebone Road, recruited his younger brothers Richard and John Lane to the new operation, and on the thirtieth of July 1935 published the first ten Penguin titles: Ariel by André Maurois, A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway, Poet's Pub by Eric Linklater, Madame Claire by Susan Ertz, The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club by Dorothy L. Sayers, William by E. H. Young, Gone to Earth by Mary Webb, Carnival by Compton Mackenzie, Twenty-Five by Beverley Nichols, and Agatha Christie's The Mysterious Affair at Styles. The Penguin imprint was named by his secretary Joan Coles on Allen's request for a dignified flightless bird; the original Penguin logo was drawn by the office junior Edward Young after a Saturday-afternoon visit to the penguin enclosure at London Zoo.

The first ten Penguins sold a million copies in their first year. Lane left the Bodley Head in October 1935 to commit Penguin to its own independent operation, leased the warehouse at Harmondsworth in Middlesex in 1937, founded Pelican Books in 1937 (the non-fiction imprint, opening with George Bernard Shaw's Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism, Capitalism, Sovietism and Fascism), Penguin Specials in 1937 (the topical contemporary affairs imprint that produced through the war the Penguin Specials series of one million seven hundred thousand sales), the Penguin Classics imprint in 1946 (under E. V. Rieu's editorship, opening with Rieu's translation of the Odyssey that sold three million copies), Puffin Books in 1940 (the children's imprint), King Penguin in 1939, and the Penguin Modern Painters and Penguin Modern Poets series across the 1940s and 1950s.

He published in August 1960 the unexpurgated edition of D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover, was prosecuted in the foundational obscenity trial Regina v. Penguin Books Limited at the Central Criminal Court in October to November 1960, was acquitted on the second of November 1960 after the Penguin defence team called thirty-five literary witnesses including E. M. Forster, Helen Gardner, Raymond Williams and Richard Hoggart; the acquittal removed the central legal restraint on the publication of imaginative literature in English. Penguin published two hundred thousand copies of Lady Chatterley in the first day after the trial, three million by the end of the year. He was knighted in 1952, sold a controlling stake in Penguin Books to the Pearson Group in 1970, and died at Bath on the seventh of July 1970 in his sixty-eighth year. Penguin Books today is part of Penguin Random House, the largest English-language book publisher in the world, with over twenty-five thousand titles in print. The Lane name in modern English-language publishing carries the weight of the June 1934 train back from Exeter.