Simon Horsford explores a little-known-about, yet extremely special, collection of texts kept in the city from one of the world’s most recognisable publishers, Penguin Books, which is marking its 90th anniversary this year. Pictured above: photo of Penguin founder Sir Allen Lane, London Zoo (1965). Source: Lane Family
Penguin, which is celebrating its 90th year, surely boasts the most famous book emblem in the world. Finding the novels dotted around bookshops, or seeing them lined up in rows in secondhand shops with their distinctive triband colour themes, gives a sense of something familiar, reassuring and, perhaps even, nostalgic for a brand that still adheres to its original message of offering quality literature at an (nowadays, still relatively) affordable price.
Less well known, maybe, is Penguin’s connection with Bristol. For tucked away in the Arts and Social Sciences Library of Bristol University – off St Michael’s Hill – lies the Penguin archive (around a kilometre of books lining row after row of metal storage shelves) and dating from 1935 (when the books first arrived on the market) to 2014 (following Penguin’s merger with Random House; those subsequent books are now kept in another archive elsewhere).
It all forms part of the library’s Special Collections section, which also holds the Wildfilm archive (charting more than 100 years of wildlife film-making) and the Feminist Archive South.
And that’s not all, as Nicky Sugar, the head of special collections, explains: “People often assume our collections will only be of interest to people studying things like history or English, but we pretty much have something for everyone – we have amazing geological, medical and musical collections for example.”
The material ranges from the 12th to the 21st Centuries.
The Murder on the Links, SC008514. Image supplied by University of Bristol Collections and used by permission from Penguin Books Limited
However, it’s the Penguin collection that is the most pertinent, partly for its anniversary year, but also because a recent survey by charity The Reading Agency suggested we are falling out of love with books. Its research revealed that 47% of adults in the UK (around 27 million) do not regularly read by choice; 16- to 24-year-olds are the least engaged, with 61% saying they are lapsed or non-readers; men too are more likely to avoid reading. Looking at those cabinets filled with lines of neatly filed Penguins going back decades, those non-readers really are missing out.
When Allen met Agatha
For now, though, let’s begin at the beginning. The idea for Penguin famously came to a young publisher, Allen Lane, in late August 1934, while he was waiting for a train back to London at Exeter station after meeting a friend, Agatha Christie. Finding nothing suitable to read at the platform bookshop, he vowed to publish a series of quality paperback books that could be “bought as easily and casually as a packet of cigarettes.”
The notion came to fruition the following year and by October 1936, Penguin had sold a staggering three million books at sixpence a piece, as Lane said at the time: “I determined to give the public an opportunity of buying the best works at nominal prices.” You can see a memorial plaque at the station marking his vision. The first 10 books included Ariel by the French author André Maurois, about the life of Percy Bysshe Shelley (the very first Penguin book), Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, Dorothy L Sayers’ The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club (a Lord Peter Wimsey novel) and Agatha Christie’s The Mysterious Affair at Styles (although that book was quickly withdrawn over contractual issue and was replaced by the author’s The Murder on the Links; now known as book 7a).
The clever thing, adds Senior Archivist Emma Howgill, is that the earliest incarnation “was all about the reprint so they could make the books as cheap as possible. Penguin didn’t have to bear the cost of the initial editorial process as all the editing work had already been done.”
Ariel, SC008513. Image supplied by University of Bristol Collections and used by permission from Penguin Books Limited
All this is documented by Special Collections at the library, which holds not only Penguin books but also its early editorial archive. Lane chose Bristol University to store the archive as his childhood home was a short walk away in Cotham Vale (where you’ll find a blue plaque denoting the fact) and he also went to nearby Bristol Grammar School, “I think he felt a connection with the place,” says Sugar. The first donation came from Lane’s private collection on the announcement of his impending retirement in 1965 (he died in 1970 aged 67 following a long illness) – “works which weren’t signed by the authors he snipped out signatures from contracts and pasted them in the front so he technically had a signed copy,” Sugar adds. Penguin added to Lane’s donation to make the number up to 5,000 in the early years and from 1975 the company regularly sent a selection to the library of their recently published books (until 2014).
Penguins, pelicans and puffins
Looking through the archive material, photos and newspaper cuttings from back in the day, the fascination comes not only from the range of authors (E.M.Forster, Salman Rushdie, Charles Dickens and Truman Capote to Zadie Smith, Virginia Woolf, HG Wells, V.S. Naipaul and Philip Pullman), but also the timelines of sister companies, such Pelican and Puffin. Howgill says “Pelican came about because Lane had the idea for non-fiction, information books and [initially] went to George Bernard Shaw and said: “We want your The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism and Capitalism [which had first appeared as a pamphlet in 1927] and Shaw said ‘absolutely, and you can have another two chapters on Sovietism and Fascism’, and Lane thought, ‘if I don’t do it then someone else will’. Hence the publication of The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism, Capitalism, Sovietism and Fascism in 1937, the first Pelican book. An acclaimed series on Shakespeare’s plays followed in 1956.
Puffin followed in 1941 aimed at younger readers (Worzel Gummidge was an early offering, as were books by Robert Louis Stevenson) and later came the Puffin Post magazine (there are copies in the archive) aimed at building a community of child subscribers.
In 1967, the Penguin founder also started an imprint under his own name comprising serious non-fiction, initially in hardback and then as orange-spine paperbacks. And there were further variations too as
Howgill tells me about the short lived Peacock series, aimed at “young adults”, which ran from 1962-1979 producing about 150 titles; for a time too a series of academic books with stiffer covers were published under the Peregrine Books banner. Among all the ephemera laid out in from of me there are large ‘advertising cards’ (originally sent to shops in the 1950s) denoting various versions of the “penguin” “puffin” and “pelican” designs over the years. Initially, Lane wanted a symbol that was “dignified but flippant” and the bird was suggested by his secretary Joan Coles with an artist despatched to London Zoo to make sketches. There are also cuttings referring to the various colour codes for the books which denoted the various topics (Lane wanted each to be instantly recognisable): blue for literature, green for crime, orange was fiction and cerise for travel, red for drama; brown was for the classics.
Call to arms
After the initial impact of the books, another impetus came during the Second World War, not only through the public, but also via Penguin’s decision to establish a Forces Book Club further enhancing the brand. The various armed units could club together and subscribe and they’d be sent six books every month, Howgill tells me, as she shows me a list of what was on offer early on in the scheme – there’s a Graham Greene, Tarka the Otter, and a host of crime fiction; other popular books included an aircraft definition guide.
But the biggest boost came with Lane’s decision to publish an unexpurgated edition of DH Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover. The subsequent victory in the high-profile 1960 obscenity trial that followed saw two million books sold by Penguin. I’m shown, not the judge’s copy of the book, (currently on display in the state room at No.10 Downing Street as part of a Penguin exhibition) but the one taken to court by Hans Schmoller, Lane’s right-hand man and graphic designer.
Lady Chattlerley’s Lover, designed by Stephen Russ, DM2752. Image supplied by University of Bristol Collections and used by permission from Penguin Books Limited.
On another floor, it’s a thrill to see the regimented lines of Penguins in huge filing cabinets – little wonder then that this collection, together with the others at the university, attracts huge interest from school and student groups and independent researchers.
“We did a lot of work for the 90th anniversary,” says Sugar, “helping with original material that informed a lot of what they did,” adding, “Many people don’t know what treasures lie within the special collections”, which in Penguin’s case is because all visits have to be sanctioned be the publishers. “It’s not like people can walk in off the street, it’s not a museum where things are on display.”
And Sugar jokes, “People have to request what they want from a catalogue like Argos. There’s no reason why it has to be academic research, it might be someone studying local history, or a graphic designer, or someone doing translation studies or wider sociological issues, like the penguin African writers’ series.” Their job is essentially to manage the material and support researchers; they had 1,300 inquiries last year across their remit.
Golden age of books
With the apparent downturn in interest in reading, I wonder if there was a golden age of buying books? “These things come in waves,” says Sugar, “if you think of how long we’ve had Kindles, if they had really taken off, then books wouldn’t be published any more, but they are. Often the death of something is predicted because something has been invented but then that gets boring and influences start going back.”
“There is a market too for the designs of books,” adds Howgill, “and it’s about owning something too”. Think about the rise in popularity again of LPs and now CDs.
However, there were peaks, reasons Sugar, “like during the Second World War, a time intense fear and discomfort so reading becomes a comfort.” And Howgill adds, “I’m sure I’ve seen an advertising picture of a penguin running towards an air raid shelter clutching a Penguin book.”
Maybe one way to encourage reading habits is via initiatives such as the Little Book Stops whereby Penguin, to further mark its anniversary, is installing “book sharing boxes” at 90 locations around the UK. In Bristol one is set to open at the University of Bristol’s micro-campus at the Wellspring Settlement on Barton Hill (aimed at fostering closer ties between the university and the local community); the box will be frequently replenished to keep the collection fresh.
Meanwhile, as I take one last look at the rows of Penguin books before walking past Sir Allen Lane’s former home, I’d like to imagine he’d be rather chuffed with his legacy and that this wonderful archive lies so close to where he spent his childhood.
bristol.ac.uk | penguin.co.uk
Image of Allen Lane licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license. (Author: Thepublicskye)
