Birds in the hand

Penguin By Design
by Phil Baines
Penguin/Allen Lane, £16.99, pp. 255, ISBN 0713998393

Publishers do not make popular heroes. Who has heard of Humph- rey Moseley, who published the Caroline poets? Or Jacob Tonson, apart from Pope’s patronising verses? Thomas Hughes made Tom Brown’s School Days famous, but could not do the same for Daniel Macmillan. But if there is an exception to the rule, it must be Allen Lane, founder of Penguin Books in 1935. The date, the format and the name have all become famous enough to put Lane in the national pantheon. But few know more than that, so a full-length biography is welcome. It is not the first: important Penguin anniversaries from 1960 onwards were celebrated with a history that contained a short life of the founder, and two long-serving henchmen — Sir William Emrys Williams and Jack Morpurgo — have both written about him. But in all these he was an icon, the man who invented Penguins.