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Literary Review
BIOGRAPHY
It is a Penguin classic, boss!
PRADEEP SEBASTIAN
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The man we have to thank for making literature urgent and handy enough to be carried around in our pockets is Allen Lane, founder of Penguin.
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The Life and Times of Allen Lane, Jeremy Lewis, Viking, p.496, price not stated.
IF you were an earnest young reader in the 1970s, looking to graduate from pulp to modern literature, you had a simple but sure way to do this: pick up a Penguin. A Penguin book was a guarantee of serious literature: modern European and American classics in understated, pocket-sized paperbacks. Later, you graduated to Picador — Sonny Mehta's brainchild — for contemporary and avant garde literature from the rest of the world (Marquez, Rushdie, Hamsun et al).
In college, students bummed Penguins off their classmates like cigarettes. The Outsider, The Trial, The Catcher in the Rye, A Portrait of the Artist as aYoung Man, A Farewell to Arms, The Great Gatsby were passed from hand to hand like contraband with comments (that passed for marginalia) like "Far out,man. Deadly." Once I ran into an old college friend who was carrying The Old Man and the Sea. He brandished it in front me, establishing his literary pedigree. I said I didn't particularly like it — and he said defensively and with some astonishment: "but it's a Penguin classic, boss."
The man we have to thank for making literature urgent enough and handy enough to be carried around in our pockets is Allen Lane, founder of Penguin. The Life and Times of Allen Lane, Jeremy Lewis' biography (published to coincide with Penguin's 70th anniversary) is absorbing, entertaining, and chockfull of publishing lore — to read Lane's life is to know the history and character of Penguin intimately. One weekend in the early 1930s, while returning from visiting Agatha Christie, Lane discovered that there was nothing to read on the station platform except magazines and pulp. This set him off on the idea of publishing literature in paperback, making it available cheaply and widely. It was his secretary who suggested the Penguin as a symbol ("dignified but flippant"). The first 10 Penguin paperbacks appeared in 1935, revolutionising publishing. Priced at six pence, they were colour coded: orange for fiction, green for crime, blue for biography. At Charing Cross Road, Lane even installed a "Penguincubator" — a book dispensing machine! Other imprints quickly followed: Pelican, Puffin and Penguin Classics. (The most recent reprints of Penguin Modern Classics, which came later, have some of the most attractive, bright book cover designs I have ever seen — pink and purple and green and yellow.)
Defending literature
This much I knew, but what I didn't know was Penguin's role in publishing and defending controversial works of literature. After publishing Lady Chatterley's Lover, Penguin was charged under the Obscene Publications Act in 1960. Lane fought back and the company was acquitted, marking a turning point in British censorship laws. Penguin sold two million copies in six weeks. Later, Penguin would fight similar battles over The Satanic Verses and Stupid White Men. Penguin has other firsts — the first eBook store and the first trade publisher to have a website. The Penguin Classics series commissions new translations of ancient and modern classics that invariably become definitive texts: Pevear and Volokhonsky's award-winning translation of Anna Karenina, Robert Fagles' translation of Homer, Tina Nunnally's translation of Sigrid Undset's three-volume epic Kristin Lavransdatter, and Lydia Davis's monumental new translation of Proust's Swann's Way. Perhaps the most telling anecdote in the book about Penguin as a brand has to do with Terry Waite, who, while being held in solitary confinement in Beirut by his kidnappers, sketched a penguin as a way of signalling to his captors for good books to read. And he was understood!
Ideal biographer
Jeremy Lewis, who has worked extensively in publishing and has chronicled the memoirs of other significant publishers, becomes the ideal biographer to evoke the life of a publisher. His book on Allen Lane evokes a vanished world of publishing; another, gentler, less commercial era. After Sir Allen Lane died in 1970, the international media group Pearson bought the company and soon after launched what has become Penguin's most respected imprint — Viking. This seems a good place to acknowledge Penguin India's role in revitalising publishing in India — making it vibrant, market-driven, eclectic. Several readers I know also feel that Penguin India's eclecticism has also meant publishing a little too prolifically. Reading Lane's life, I realised that he had always worked that way, that this was his legacy — he published a lot and wanted books to be available in chain stores. He printed at low cost and took chances on all kinds of writers and genres. Not to forget his first ever automated warehouse. It may surprise readers to know that it wasn't liked even then. Orwell, for instance, was suspicious of publishing books this way. For me at any rate, Penguin will always mean those much-thumbed, soiled, silver (not orange) coloured copies of The Great Gatsby or The Outsider or Nausea, marking a kind of rites of passage from childhood reading to literary adolescence.
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