HOMER IS HIS BEST-SELLER!

New Zealand Listener, Volume 28, Issue 713, 13 March 1953, Page 7

HOMER IS HIS BEST-SELLER!

HE sturdy man in a tweed sports coat dropped off a tram and walked across the street through Lambton Quay’s midafternoon traffic. Sir Allen Lane was in Wellington in the course of his travels through Australia and New Zealand. As managing director of Penguin Books Ltd. he has done more than anyone in this century to bring good books to millions of readers at prices which they can afford to pay again and again. With his paper-bound volumes he has created something of a publishers’ revolution in the Englishspeaking world. "We hear a lot of talk about the theory that to sell a mass-produced product to the largest possible audience you have to aim at the lowest common denominator of intelligence, the imagined taste of a 12 or 13 year old," he said in an interview with The Listener. "My own experience has proved that this is not true.’ He revealed himself as a man of ideals. If the aim of his organisation is to produce good books cheaply, the operative word for him is "good." Although he has had to work on the principle that each of his books must appeal to a very large num- ber of people, he has never lowered his standards of what he considers to be a good book, both in format and contents, His attitude has been justified by sales, he says. His biggest sales are of serious works, books about culture, new translations of the classics. Pelicansbooks with a definite educational impulse behind them-are outselling the ordinary Penguin fiction book because they cater for a market not supplied by cheap editions, The same could be said of the Penguin Classics. He says that the current best-seller of all Penguin publications is Homer’s Odyssey, in a new translation by E. V. Rieu. Its sales are around the million mark, and the book continues to sell in British countries and America at the rate of 5000 a month. The Penguin Poets were also selling remarkably well, over half a million copies up to now. Sir. Allen Lane has recently opened branches of his publishing firm in America, Canada and Australia, because he believes that "the balance of power is shifting to this part of the world." While he. was in Australia last month he contracted, for a book of Australian history, a book of elever essays about

famous Australians, and an anthology of Australian verse. On the day before he met The Listener he had already conferred with a New Zealand’ historian about a Penguin history of this country. Were there prospects of good sales of New Zealand books in England? "Most decidedly," he said, "provided the work stands on its own feet. It wouldn’t be true to say that there is a particular interest in Britain in writing from any particular country. The prospects of sales depend on quality alone. In the main it boils down to what the public wants to buy." As a man who has to an unusual extent risked his career as a publisher on his own ideas of what the public wants to buy, he has had remarkable success. The big gamble started for him in 1935, and it was made against the advice of every reputable publishing firm in Britain, against the advice of friends and against the lesson of all experience, But on a midsummer morning in that year ten sixpenny reprints appeared on the stalls of shops in Britain. They were to set the pattern for what followed, for they included books by a famous French biographer, a famous American novelist, a woman detective write-, a brilliant young man. of letters. The policy was one of something good for every taste. Out of the Crypt He persuaded booksellers to take his new product by travelling the country with a dummy copy of Eric Linklater’s Poet’s Pub, in which the first 32 pages were repeated over and over to make a book of 256 pages. His reception was lukewarm, so he went also to the people who specialise in the sale of sixpenny articles, the chain stores. They liked his price but not his titles. Would people buy André Maurois’ biography of the poet Shelley, Beverley Nichols’ TwentyFive, Ernest Heminway’s A Farewell to Arms? The chain stores took a chance, and within two days had ‘more than doubled their order. The first 20 Penguins were distributed by John Lane, the Bodley Head, but at the beginning of 1936 Penguin Books Ltd. was formed with a capital of £100 and with three directors, Allen, Richard, and John Lane. The brothers rented the crypt of Holy Trinity Church in Euston Road, where the walls were panelled with marble tombstones. One of the tombs was empty and made a convenient wall safe, but life in the crypt was fairly primitive: heating was by a Primus

stove and sanitation by bucket. Next year Penguins moved out into the country. : Sir Allen Lane has helped himself along the road to success by using a remarkable talent for getting the best available people to work for him. In 1936, with Krishna Menon, W. E. Williams, Secretary of the British Institute of Adult Education, and H. L. Beales of the London School of Economics, he started the Pelican series. The bird with the capacious beak was like a mark of the voracious appetite for knowledge of the, students and others desiring self-improvement who bought in millions, The threat of war led to the Penguin Specials, and Lane accomplished a great publishing feat when he flew to Paris. lunched with Madame Tabouis, commissioned a book called Blackmail or War? and within three weeks of receiving the manuscript had printed, bound and sold a quarter of a million copies. Cheapest and- Best Soon he had persuaded the young poet and critic John Lehmann to edit Penguin New Writing, which reflected the wartime revival of interest in the arts. He continued his policy of nothing but the best by appointing R. B. Fishenden, Britain’s greatest authority on colour printing, as technical editor of the King Penguins-a series devoted to art-and in 1947 arranged for Jan Tschichold, one of Europe’s outstanding typographers and book designers, to join him for three years as director of typography. W. E. Williams, who had become editor-in-

chief, was recently appointed Secretary General of the Arts Council in Britain. Lane seemed unable to stop spreading and the Penguin Classics began with the object of presenting original translations "written in good modern English and shorn of pedagogic fal-lals," of Greek, Latin, and later European classics, even of Chaucer. The Penguin Scores are edited by Dr. Gordon Jacob of the Royal College of Music, the Modern Painters series is edited by Sir Kenneth Clark, the Penguin Shakespeare by G. B. Harrison. And then there are the Penguin Guides, the Buildings of England, the Puffin Books for children, the Penguin "millions" or temvolume editions of Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, D H. Lawrence, Evelyn Waugh, and such detective writers as Agatha Christie and Ngaio Marsh. Television Helps Sir Allen Lane is not afraid that television will affect book sales. He thinks that by reviewing new books and publicising individual authors television is helping to persuade people to buy more books than ever before. Last year was the greatest of all years for book publication and book sales in England, he said. It is a typical remark. He is an optimist, a genial, robust man with a frank, down-to-earth manner, and he likes to suggest that as head of Penguin Books he has nothing to do but sit back in comfort while his brilliant and energetic executives do all the hard work. But more than this was needed to bring culture and good books to‘ his best cus-tomers-those whom he nonchalantly describes as the Aoj polloi-and make them like it.