Those wartime crime Penguins

Anybody who collects early Penguins knows two things:

  • the crime titles (in green covers) are rarer than the standard novels (in orange covers).
  • The wartime editions, particularly those published from 1942 onwards, up to the end of the war, are much rarer than both earlier and later editions

Put those two things together and a third thing becomes obvious – wartime crime titles are very rare.

Rarity alone doesn’t make books valuable, but the combination of rarity and high demand does.  And since there are a surprising number of people interested in early Penguins, often trying to collect the first 1000 in first printings, demand for the wartime crime titles is high, and so are prices.

Change was gradual at the start of the war, for paperbacks as for many other things, and early wartime Penguins from late 1939 and much of 1940 are not too difficult to find.  But with the Battle of Britain in mid-1940 and the introduction of paper rationing around the same time, wartime conditions were really starting to bite by the end of the year.  From about Penguin volume 300 onwards, the books start to get thinner and start to become much rarer.  Volumes 301 to 304, all crime titles published at the end of 1940, are really the first of the rarities.

For some reason that I can’t explain, the next three or four crime titles seem to be a little easier to find, but from then on there’s no let up.  The twenty-seven crime Penguins numbered between 350 and 500 and roughly published between mid-1942 and mid-1945, are unremittingly difficult to find, often expensive to buy and often in very poor condition.

Penguins from this period were printed to the ‘War Economy Standard’ on very poor quality paper.  They are usually very thin, with small type and small margins to cram as much as possible onto the minimum amount of paper.  They fall apart very easily and would not last long with repeated use.   The popularity of crime titles at the time, and the shortage of books, meant that many of them were passed around, read and re-read and would naturally have disintegrated.   Those that survived at all, usually survived in poor condition.  Even reprints from this period are scarce.

Many of the books are of dubious quality.   Penguin was not the leading UK publisher of crime novels at the time, and Collins probably had the pick of the best writers.   Writers such as Eric Bennett, Stuart Martin, Lewis Robinson and Richard Keverne didn’t leave much of a collective mark on the history of crime writing.  But there was still room in this group for two titles by Margery Allingham, three by Ngaio Marsh, and one from Mignon Eberhart, amongst writers whose reputations have stood the test of time.

There are of course differences of opinion about which are the rarest books.  Some say ‘Panic Party’ by Anthony Berkeley (volume 402), but there’s a good case to be made also for the two Georgette Heyer titles – ‘The unfinished clue’ (volume 428) and ‘Why shoot a butler?’ (volume 429).  Two earlier titles, ‘The general goes too far’ by Lewis Robinson and ‘William Cook – Antique dealer’ by Richard Keverne (volume 383 and 384) are certainly very rare as well, as are others from the same period.

Wartime Crime Penguins 1

But then others say that the rarest of all is not even a crime Penguin, but is the one Biggles book to be published by Penguin – volume 348, ‘Biggles flies again’ by W.E. Johns.   There’s competition for that one from collectors of Biggles stories as well as Penguin collectors.  Good luck if you’re searching for it – but you may need deep pockets as well as luck.

Penguin 348

 

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Posted on September 17, 2017, in Vintage Paperbacks and tagged , , , . Bookmark the permalink. 2 Comments.

  1. I had no idea they were rarer! A little used book store in Rome had a number of green novels, but I didn’t think much of it. The store has since closed up.

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