Allen Lane and Penguin

Some revolutions arrive in the costume of revolt, banners and broken glass. Others arrive in the costume of common sense, carried by a man who is merely irritated. He has missed a chance at a decent book and his train will not wait. The industry he is about to dismantle has, for a hundred years, been so confident in its arrangements that it has stopped noticing the reader on the platform. It will be undone by a publisher who does notice him, because for one evening he is that reader himself.

THE NAME ON THE DEED-POLL

He is Allen Lane Williams, born at 33 Wesley Avenue, Bristol, on the twenty-first of September 1902, eldest son of a corporation clerk. There would be no Penguin had there not first been an uncle. John Lane, founder of the Bodley Head at the Sign of the Bodley Head, Vigo Street, publisher of Wilde and Beardsley and the original Yellow Book, had no son. In 1919, on Allen's sixteenth birthday, the boy was brought down to London, articled to the firm at five shillings a week, and on his eighteenth birthday the family name was set aside by deed-poll. Williams went into a drawer in Bristol. Lane walked into Vigo Street. By 1925 he was a director; by 1930, after his uncle's death, effectively in charge of a list that smelled of the nineties and sold like it. He had learned the trade backwards, from the storeroom up: how a book is set, sewn, jacketed, invoiced, returned. He knew the eight-and-sixpence hardback the way a butcher knows a carcass. He had begun, quietly, to find it absurd.

EXETER ST DAVIDS, LATE

Sunday, the spring of 1935. He has spent the weekend at Greenway, on a wooded bend of the Dart, with Agatha Christie and Max Mallowan, talking through the manuscript that will become Death in the Clouds. The cottage is full of typescript and pipe-smoke and the particular silence Christie keeps around her own plots. A car has taken him into Exeter for the late sleeper to Paddington. It is past eleven. The platform at St Davids is cold for May; air off the Exe estuary, the wet iron smell of a country station after rain. The train is not yet in.

He goes to the bookstall. W. H. Smith and Son, the familiar livery, the familiar smell of newsprint and tobacco. The fiction is arranged in the manner that has been standard on British platforms since Smith's opened the first railway bookstall at Euston in 1848: yellowbacks two-deep, sixpenny detective serials, the cheap reprint romances with their pulp covers, magazines stacked at the till. He runs his eye along the spines. Sapper. Edgar Wallace. The familiar bilge. Nothing of Hemingway. Nothing of Maurois. Nothing of his own list, because nothing on his own list comes at a price a man buys on impulse before a train.

A SECOND OF TIME AT THE BOOKSTALL

He stands at the rack a moment longer than a man buying a book ordinarily does. The platform clock ticks above his head. He is, by trade, the publisher of these absences; the Bodley Head's seven-and-sixpence hardbacks sit in Foyles and Hatchards and the better drawing-rooms of Hampstead, and they do not sit here, because here a book must cost what a packet of Players costs, sixpence, and at sixpence one is not permitted to print Hemingway. The convention is iron. Hardback at seven-and-six for the lending libraries and the carriage trade; cheap reprint at two shillings eighteen months later for the suburbs; and at sixpence, only the pulp, because at sixpence the trade cannot afford the royalty, the paper, the binding, the warehousing, the discount to W. H. Smith. Everyone knows this. He has been told it, in those words, by men older than himself in panelled rooms off the Strand. It is, in the trade, what one might call received opinion, which is the publisher's term for an idea no one has bothered to test since Gladstone. The thought arrives without drama, the way the useful thoughts do. It arrives as arithmetic. Twenty thousand copies at sixpence, with the unit cost driven to threepence by a long print-run and a stripped binding, with Woolworths taking the volume that the bookshops will not, with the author paid a halfpenny a copy instead of a shilling and made whole by quantity. The figures fit on the back of an envelope and he will, on the train, fit them there. He does not yet know he is making a decision. He only knows that the bookstall is wrong and that the wrongness is, for the first time in his ten years in the trade, legible to him as a number.

The whistle. The sleeper draws in under a hiss of steam. He boards with no book. The compartment smells of cold leather and coal. He takes out an envelope.

BOW STREET, MONDAY MORNING

He puts the proposal to the Bodley Head board on the Monday. Reprint the firm's better titles, and titles bought in from Cape and Chatto and Heinemann, at sixpence, paperback, in a uniform livery, sold not through bookshops but through Woolworths, the tobacconists, the railway stalls. A board of men who have known his uncle longer than they have known him hear him out. They tell him, in the way boards tell young directors things, that it cannot be done, that it has been tried, that the booksellers will not stand for it, that it will cheapen the list. The reprint societies have already taken the obvious ground. Tauchnitz in Leipzig has done it for the Continent for a century without troubling anyone. The Albatross, prettier and cleverer, is doing it now. Why should England want a fourth? He notes the objections. He resigns. He takes his younger brothers Richard and John with him. He leases the crypt of Holy Trinity, Marylebone Road, a brick undercroft into which a lorry can back, and which costs almost nothing because it is a crypt. The firm is registered. The name, his wife will later say, was chosen one evening over the kitchen table; a dignified bird, flightless, faintly comic, drawable by an office junior. Edward Young, twenty-one years old, is sent to London Zoo with a sketchbook.

THE THIRTIETH OF JULY

Ten titles. Ariel, by André Maurois. A Farewell to Arms, by Hemingway. Poet's Pub, by 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. The Mysterious Affair at Styles, by Christie, his weekend hostess, who has signed away the paperback rights for a halfpenny a copy because he asked her at breakfast. The covers are Young's: three horizontal bands, orange and white for fiction, green for crime, blue for biography, the title set in Gill Sans, the bird squat and self-satisfied at the foot. The list price, sixpence. The booksellers shrug. Woolworths, whose chief buyer is a Mrs Clifford Prescott, hesitates, looks at the orange, says she will take them. The order she places is, by itself, a print run. Within twelve months the imprint has sold a million copies, and the Bodley Head, watching its renegade director's pavement carts roll out of the crypt at Marylebone, calls in its loan and forces him to buy out its share. On the twentieth of August 1936, Penguin Books Limited stands on its own.

THE COUNTING HOUSE

Elsewhere that summer, in panelled rooms off the Strand, the trade is doing the arithmetic he has already done. Stanley Unwin, the most thoughtful publisher of his generation, writes that the experiment is interesting but cannot last; the economics do not add up; the author cannot be properly paid at sixpence; the bookseller will be ruined. He is courteous and he is wrong. Jonathan Cape, who has lent Lane four of the first ten titles on the assumption that paperbacks will damage his hardback sales and ought therefore to be done by somebody else, watches his hardback sales rise, because a man who reads Hemingway at sixpence on a Tuesday buys Hemingway at seven-and-six on a Saturday. The lending libraries fold quietly through the decade. Boots Booklovers' closes its subscription counters in 1966. The Times Book Club follows. The eight-shilling novel does not die, but it ceases to be the only door into a serious book, and the door he has cut at sixpence stands open for the rest of the century.

RETURN

He was knighted in 1952. In 1960 Penguin printed, in Britain, the unexpurgated Lady Chatterley's Lover, and stood trial at the Old Bailey under the Obscene Publications Act; the acquittal belongs to the Lawrence page, but the dock was his. He died at Silverbeck, his house in Buckinghamshire, on the seventh of July 1970, sixty-seven years old, and is buried in the churchyard at Bow Brickhill. Penguin Books now prints something near a hundred and fifty million volumes a year in the English-language world, and the three-band cover with its squat bird has become the visual grammar of cheap reading everywhere.

The revolution, when it arrives in the costume of common sense, leaves behind not a monument but a habit. The habit is that a serious book is a sixpenny object, or its modern equivalent; that it lives in a coat pocket; that it is bought between a packet of cigarettes and a railway ticket. Somewhere in a junk shop in Devon, in a box marked sixpence each, an orange-and-white spine still surfaces, the bird at the foot of it patient as a clerk.