AL and Lettice’s big day in 1941, with a Penguin guard of honour Allen Lane at the Penguincubator machine

A thankfully slim biography of the founder of Penguin Books satisfies veteran bookseller Ian Norrie

Penguin Special: The Life and Times of Allen Lane, by Jeremy Lewis
Viking, £25

ALLEN Lane, founder of Penguin Books, emerges from this biography as a man haunted by his massive success.
Character flaws do not always fit happily with the image of “a great popular educator” and “the creator of a cultural revolution”, but this was scarcely Lane’s fault. He did not in his early or middle years anticipate high acclaim.
He formed Penguin in his own interests to save an ailing publishing house. Born in Bristol in 1902, Allen Williams changed his name as a condition of joining his kinsman, John Lane, creator of a dazzling 1890s imprint, The Bodley Head.
He was neither an intellectual nor especially literary. Lane had an eye for good design, became a collector of paintings and enjoyed popular theatre. He did not shine at school or attend university.
Lane became a publisher by chance but would rather have been a farmer. By the time he was 50 he had been knighted for his services to literature and education.
Penguin Books was a product of the 1930s depression when many publishers neared bankruptcy. Sir Allen inherited Bodley Head from his childless relative’s widow and kept the company afloat and risked prosecution by publishing James Joyce’s Ulysses.
It did not make him a millionaire as happened three decades on when he won a famous victory with the expurgated version of Lady Chatterley’s Lover.
In 1935, Lane brought out a range of 6d paperbacks which the book trade at first regarded scornfully. The public did not. From the first batch, supported by Woolworth’s, a ready market was found.
By the time there was serious competition, Penguin had spread into Pelicans Puffins (for children) Classics (The Odyssey sold three million copies) poetry, cookery and gardening handbooks, travel guides, prints, miniature scores, the erudite Buildings of England series and the enchantingly designed King Penguins, now collectors items, on a variety of subjects from moths to monumental brasses.
Lane achieved world renown by surrounding himself with advisers, often scholarly, to whom he listened. His colleagues fell under his spell but few became life-long friends.
He was supportive and treacherous in equal measure; of himself, he remarked that even those he loved “could only get so close, but no closer”.
An earlier biography, by JE Morpurgo, noted at least 50 epithets were used about its subject ranging from loveable and benevolent to bland, bold, callous, devious, perverse.
Morpurgo, who worked for Penguin after World War Two, considered himself in line for the succession but quarrelled irrevocably with Allen on family matters.
Jeremy Lewis has written a more concentrated, balanced and shorter biography and is more understanding than Morpurgo about the stresses facing Penguin editors during Lane’s last decades.
I would dispute his view, that, in the 1950s, the founder “lost some of his old sparkle”.
Certainly by then Lane had become a farmer (he bought his first farm during World War II) and he took long holidays.
But when I met him in 1958 he seemed still impressively in charge.
He was considering the publication of Lady Chatterley and soon to appoint the bookseller Tony Goodwin as editorial adviser.
Lewis skillfully describes the dramas implicit in both instances.
The release of Lawrence’s novel led to queues of lorry drivers entering bookshops for the first time in their lives and to the flotation of Penguin as a public company. Taking on Godwin, who swiftly became editorial chief, had an element of reincarnation.
Godwin was as mercurial, innovative, difficult as Allen himself. Tony Godwin was precisely the new broom Penguin needed.
He lasted seven fractious, prosperous years, supported adoringly by a partly new team who mourned his going.
This came about through his commissioning a book by the French cartoonist Sine. Some thought it was blasphemous. Lane agreed to publication but later had all the copies taken to his farm, where, so far is known, they were destroyed.
This indicates, perhaps as graphically as any biographer could, the essential Allen Lane.
Lewis tends to skim over matters arising from Penguin’s globalisation, which led to demands for greater independence and indigenous publishing.
Lane, usually happy to delegate editorially, hated not to be in overall control of his worldwide company. This was a battle he had to lose.
This biographer’s unfashionable brevity is admirable. Nowadays most lives thump, volume after volume, from the press 1,000 pages long but his comes in one of just over 400.
His potted accounts of some of Lane’s most notable colleagues are good but he should have made more of Ron Blass, who joined Penguin as a boy, returned from the war to a menial warehouse job and died in the 1970s as deputy managing director. Blass, who probably never read a book, became as close as anyone to Lane.
Not only able but liked by booksellers, he was agreeable company, ready to take a glass of wine with a King Penguin who could be made uneasy by the intellectuals nurturing his publishing brain child.
n Ian Norrie is the former chairman of the Society of Bookmen, former member of the Booker Prize Committee and the National Book League, and ran the High Hill Bookshop in Hampstead for more than 30 years.