Allen Lane, King Penguin: A Biography

If ever there has been in the twentieth century a man whose monument is all around us, that man is Allen Lane, the founder of Penguin Books. He brought to millions of people throughout the world the enjoyment of reading as a way of severing the linked assumptions of intelligence, class, and education which, still for too many, cut off from their lives the 'bookish' world. He stands as a revolutionary figure.

What kind of man, then, was he? To those expecting a self-taught didact, or an earnest do-gooder, Allen Lane was highly disconcerting. He wore everything lightly. There was about his own person just that 'dignified flippancy' which he liked to think signified the Penguin image. It became easy then to smile at the paradox of the greatest publisher of his time being also one of the great non-readers of the book trade; and from there it became easy to underestimate the man himself, to forget the steely professionalism of his vision.

J. E. Morpurgo approaches this very baffling man by tracing the profound influence of his 'uncle', the famous John Lane of John Lane The Bodley Head, and the formation of Allen's views in the family crucible of his brothers' company. The salad years of Allen, Dick, and John Lane at The Bodley Head provide a series of hilarious capers against the background of London in the 1920s and early 1930s. The essential idea of mass-produced, mass-distributed, cheap books was itself the last of the capers — a formula, thought some, fit to save The Bodley Head; a formula, thought others, fit to bankrupt The Bodley Head. J. E. Morpurgo, himself a former Penguin, skillfully separates myth from reality in telling the story of the birth of Penguin Books. He then takes us into the excitement of the start of the Pelican list, the war years, and the heady post-war development which started with the first and most famous Penguin Classic, E. V. Rieu's translation of Homer's The Odyssey. These were probably Allen Lane's happiest years.