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. This is the first attempt to get at the man, a slippery, elusive character whom Lewis has done well to pin down. It is his ‘life and times’, not a history of Penguin Books, which may one day be written, and all the better for this portrait.

He was not even called Lane, but his childless uncle, John Lane of the Bodley Head, visiting his West Country relations in Bristol, took a fancy to them, and offered Allen a job, provided that he changed his name; his younger brothers, Richard and John, followed suit. John Lane has had a rather bad press, mainly for not standing up for Oscar Wilde and Aubrey Beardsley (both unwillingly inherited from Leonard Smithers), but he was a capable as well as original publisher. Allen quickly picked up the trade, and would reminisce in later life about days spent packing books and calling on booksellers for orders.