Biography: The story of a man who made an imprint on the world's consciousness
A natty Bristolean (like Cary Grant), born Williams with Devonian roots on his mother's side (whose name he took aged 16 on leaving grammar school to secure succession in The Bodley Head), Allen Lane was the quintessential English career publisher - hermetic, wily, paradoxical - who did more to change the cultural landscape of his age than any other individual of the 20th century. Jeremy Lewis, a consummate biographer of Cyril Connolly (1997) and Smollett (2003), whose own memoir of days in twilit, pre-Tiger, Trinity Dublin is hilarious, writes of Lane with exemplary, detailed Wodehousean brio, adding deft summaries and asides on the huge cast of characters that made up AL's life and times. Ethel Mannin, for example, dewy-eyed founder of the League for Sexual Reform and the "Artemis" of Yeats's post-monkey-gland escapades, figured large in the insouciant, gin-soaked days of Penguin's founding.
Of leftish instincts (like most thinking persons in the 1930s), "mercurial and easily bored", Lane pioneered the true democratisation of the word, giving "access to some of that knowledge on which a reasonable life must be based" with his mass-market, elegant sixpenny phials (Harry Potter avant son jour). He harnessed the energies of two key lieutenants in his list-building: Krishna Menton, soap-box orator and pamphleteer, who later became Nehru's defence minister in the newly independent India, and WE Williams, an evangelical Welshman on the national executive of the Workers' Educational Association, non-conformist, autodidactic. Both became central to the Pelican (the first major non-fiction offshoot) advisory panel. They settled on a greenfield site at the village of Harmondsworth near Heathrow Airport in late 1936 and never looked back.
As world war came on, Penguin Specials emerged in November 1937. They were written to supplement the news, were turned round in weeks rather than months, and created the appetite they fed on. By 1939 Penguin had sold nine million books, qualifying AL for heftier paper rations than Gollancz et al, with added supplies given for armed force and prisoner-of-war editions. As war itself struck, AL's astonishing energy, application and dedication kicked in and imprints and series exploded, including King Penguins and Puffin Picture Books (in 1940 under Noel Carrington, Dora's brother). Penguin New Writing, edited by John Lehmann ("unappealing in person . . . an incomparable editor"), embarked in December 1940, selling 80,000 of its first volume and peaking at 100,000 in 1945, 10 times the quantity of Cyril Connolly's Horizon). Penguin Modern Painters got under way under Kenneth Clarke's watch in 1944.
In 1946 came AL's true watermark, and which gave him most pleasure: Penguin Classics. It began with EV Rieu's translation of Homer's Odyssey (on Rieu's retirement in 1964 there were more than 200 titles on the list). The magisterial Nicholas Pevsner's Buildings of England and a Pelican History of Art followed. In 1946 Penguin published the "Shaw million" (100,000 each of 10 works) for George Bernard Shaw, who had championed the Lane enterprise from its earliest days: Waugh, Wells, Lawrence and Agatha Christie received similar "awards" later. Swiss typographer-designer Jan Tschichold and his successor Hans Schmoller ensured incomparable standards of production, shepherding the books into perfection of form.
AL was both a loner and deeply familial. Both brothers were in the business: John was killed off north Africa in 1942 while Dick managed the Australian office. His marriage to Lettice Orr in 1941 was pragmatic and passionless ("The 'W' is silent," he commented to a friend) and in 1955 he inherited Ledig Rowhalt's mistress, Susanne Lepsius, while Lettice left home. His own three children, Christine, Clare and Anna (who had Down syndrome), scarcely figure in Lewis's story.
Fecundity was kept to the page, where AL was most at ease, immured by books, bringing bricks to Babylon. By the time of his successful defence of Lady Chatterley's Lover in October 1960 AL had published some 3,500 titles, selling 250 million books in all. The great melting pot of the 1960s passed the aegis of wünderkind Tony Godwin (founder of Better Books), who AL inherited from Tom Maschler, a passing comet on his way to his own heavens. While Kaye Webb gave spectacular wing to Puffin Books, Godwin - with cohort Dieter Pevsner - recommissioned the Specials and introduced designers Germano Facetti and flower child Alan Aldridge. He spawned Peregrine Books (the "egghead" paperbacks) in 1961, Penguin English Library, Penguin Modern Classics, Penguin Modern Poets, Modern European Poets, Penguin African Library and Penguin Shakespeare, before exiting ignominiously in 1966 (the oedipal tipping-point some blasphemous cartoons by Siné). His most enduring monument, ironically, was Allen Lane The Penguin Press, a quality hardback imprint also dear to his boss's heart, anticipating the trend for "vertical" publishing (integrated paperback and hardback houses) in later decades, with Studs Terkel, Hunter Thompson, Octavio Paz, Al Alvarez, John Berger and RD Laing among the firmament.
The decade closed with AL's last great signing and publication, the Penguin Ulysses, for £75,000 - the highest advance paid to date - closing the circle on his own acquisition of the masterpiece published by The Bodley Head in 1936.
In 1969 I was given this Penguin Modern Classic No 3,000 (selling for 50p, or 10 shillings - all was changed) as a school prize. I have it still, with its little orange mammal, deeply cherished. By the time Lane died on July 7th, 1970, the power of the word and his legacy had never seemed so life-transforming.
Antony Farrell published the first Dublin Edition of Ulysses on June 16th, 1997, under his imprint, The Lilliput Press