Tag Archives: The Green Penguin

The Green Penguin Transcript

Caroline: It started, as things so often do in the world of Shedunnit, with Agatha Christie. In the early autumn of 1934, Christie hosted a weekend house party at her childhood home of Ashfield in Torquay, Devon. Afterwards, one of her guests was making his way back to London by train and found himself with an hour to wait at Exeter railway station — this is still where you change trains if you make this journey by rail today. Unforgivably, he didn’t have a book with him, and so was browsing the station bookstall with a view to purchasing some reading material for the wait and the journey ahead.

The selection on offer shocked and disgusted him with its limitations, or so the legend goes. There were glossy magazines aplenty. Expensive, bulky hardback editions of new novels and non-fiction books were on offer too. At the bargain end were titles that had been remaindered — that is, books that didn’t sell very well that publishers offer at a deep discount to get rid of unwanted stock — and what one account calls “the shabby reprints of shoddy novels”. But without spending at least 7s 6d — worth about £20 today — he couldn’t get a good quality, easily portable book to read. Getting on the train empty handed, this guest of Christie’s spent his four hour journey back to London pondering this problem. Little did his fellow passengers know, if they caught sight of him deep in thought, that this man was soon going to change the way people read books forever.

Today, we are going to witness the hatching of the green Penguin.

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Welcome to Shedunnit. I’m Caroline Crampton. And before we get into this episode, I just wanted to let you know that I have a book coming out soon that you might be interested to check out if you enjoy the work I do on Shedunnit. It’s called A Body Made of Glass and it’s a personal memoir as well as a cultural history of hypochondria. It will be published by Granta in the UK and Harpercollins in the US in April, and it’s currently available to pre-order everywhere books are sold. There’s also an exclusive ebook and online launch event just for those who pre-order — check the description of this episode or head to carolinecrampton.com to find links to find out more about the book and take part.

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That man who spent the weekend at Ashfield with Agatha Christie and was then so annoyed about the lack of good reading material at Exeter station was Allen Lane. In the autumn of 1934, he was a managing editor at The Bodley Head, a publishing company that had been founded in 1887 by his uncle John Lane. Lane senior had been an influential antiquarian bookseller in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. With his partner Elkin Mathews, he had started a publishing company named after the bust of 16th century scholar Sir Thomas Bodley that sat over the door of their shop in Vigo Street, London. The Bodley Head quickly made waves in the 1890s with their literary periodical The Yellow Book and their work with Max Beerbohm, Aubrey Beardsley and Oscar Wilde. Annie Lane, John’s wife, was influential in recommending works to acquire for English translation — she was fluent in German and French and could read books in Italian and Spanish too. It was largely thanks to her that The Bodley Head developed a reputation for originality in the first two decades of the twentieth century, through their championing of writers like Anatole France and André Maurois. Indeed, when the Lanes arranged for Anatole France to come to London for a press tour in 1913 it must have seemed as if nothing could go wrong for The Bodley Head. A banquet was held in France’s honour at the Savoy, he was invited to tea with the prime minister at 10 Downing Street, and crowds of fans waited in the London streets to catch a glimpse of him — all because of the book that they had published.

But in the following ten years, John Lane expanded too quickly and over-reached himself financially as he tried to compete with bigger publishing companies. During the war, his house in Lancaster Gate Terrace was bombed and the household relocated to Bath, where John was able to reconnect with his sister Camilla Williams, who lived in Bristol with her husband and four children. John and Annie had no children of their own, and John was anxious to find an heir who would take The Bodley Head on after his death. He decided upon his nephew Allen Williams, who changed his name to Allen Lane in recognition of his uncle’s bequest. Allen came to London in 1919 at the age of 17 to start work at the company as an apprentice and general office boy. Then in 1925 John Lane died of influenza, followed in early 1927 by Annie. Allen therefore inherited control of The Bodley Head. It was, however, a company mired in financial and political difficulties after a recent trial resulting from a book Allen had published the year before that purported to be the scandalous memoirs of a retired British diplomat but was in fact the invention of the gossipy actor Hesketh Pearson. Allen was gung-ho about wanting to make a splash in the literary world, but the company’s other directors were cautious and worried. It wasn’t a good combination.

Nine years later, when Allen Lane had his revelation on the train between Exeter and London, The Bodley Head was a greatly diminished force in publishing. They had launched the career of one Agatha Christie, publishing her first five books beginning with The Mysterious Affair at Styles in 1920, but she had soon departed for a more favourable deal at Collins, where she was to remain for the rest of her career. Struggling financially, The Bodley Head was often unable to compete with the advances and the print runs offered to authors elsewhere. Allen had by now brought his brothers Richard and John into the business, and they all lived together at a house in Talbot Square. The brothers had a peculiar morning ritual of sharing the bathroom — Allen in the bath while Richard shaved and John sat on the toilet seat and chatted, before they rotated. They could be in there for over an hour while they bathed, shaved and plotted the future of the publishing company that they now controlled. It was here that they cooked up the plan to buy the rights to James Joyce’s Ulysses, which was struggling to find a home with a big British publisher following an obscenity trial in the US. And it was to the bathroom that Allen brought both his experiences trying to buy a book at Exeter station and the outcome of a conference he attended in October 1934 titled “The New Reading Public”.

This conference was attended by lots of major booksellers and publishers. They all agreed that the market for books was changing rapidly and that a new kind of publishing was required to take advantage of it. Socioeconomic changes, especially the rapid expansion of the middle class in the half century before the first world war, had created a much larger cohort of people with the money to spend on books and the leisure time in which to read them. The commuting lower middle classes especially — the clerks, the secretaries, the shop assistants that I covered back in 2022 in an episode titled The Nobodies — were driving demand for books that suited their tastes and budget that they could read while on the train, bus or tram. The Education Act of 1870 had been influential in improving elementary education across the UK, and the children who had benefited from it were adults flooding into the ever-proliferating office jobs in Britain’s cities. Just as a new kind of publishing had sprung up to cater to them as children, so did it seem like the same was required for these well-educated, literate, upwardly-mobile adults.

What the conference attendees couldn’t agree on, though, was the best way to exploit this opportunity. There had been attempts, but none had quite worked. Some, like J.M. Dent’s Everyman’s Library, had experimented with offering high quality literature in editions sold at “the democratic price” of one shilling. Others had started reissuing hardback classics in cheap paperback series like Chatto’s Phoenix Library and Hodder’s Yellow Jackets — deliberately pricing them down once they judged they had seen all the sales of the more expensive version that were likely to come. Victor Gollancz, who was to be so influential in during the golden age of detective fiction as the publisher of Dorothy L. Sayers and others, was then working at Ernest Benn and experimenting with something called Benn’s Sixpenny Library, for which well-known academics like Bertrand Russell were commissioned to write primers on serious subjects that were then sold in paperback for sixpence. But none of these ventures had really taken off because publishers couldn’t sell the books in sufficient volume to offset the royalties they had to pay to republish the works and the paper and production costs of the books themselves. As one bookseller put it at the conference, “if we can’t make money at seven and six, how are we going to make it at sixpence?” Paperbacks were also seen at the time as inherently cheap and disposable, associated with lowbrow, pulpy genres.

The plan that Allen Lane dreamed up in the bathroom with his brothers, and then in The Bodley Head’s “dark little office” in Vigo Street, was essentially to go big or go home. They would produce a new series of affordable, nicely produced paperbacks that contained high quality literary works, and they would aim to sell enough of them that the price could remain low without the series making a loss. Allen was absolutely committed to the cover price being only sixpence, believing that a good book should cost the same as a packet of ten cigarettes. They worked out that they would need to sell 17,000 copies of each book to break even, over five times more than for their usual hardback editions. Allen had two main ideas for how they would get over this very high bar.

The first was that these books would be sold in places other than just bookshops and railway stations — bookshops could be intimidating for some of the book buyers that Allen wanted to target, and he wanted to put the books where they already were, like in stations and chemists, rather than trying to get them to change their habits. And it was an early order from the nationwide haberdashery chain Woolworths that gave early indication that this venture was going to work where others had failed. The buyer at Woolworths, Clifford Prescott, was more accustomed to doing deals over fabric and lace, but he had some success with a cheap edition of Walt Disney’s Three Little Pigs that Allen had previously sold him, so he was at least partially open to the idea that his customers would buy books in Woolworths. Prescott was sceptical about the new series, though, until his wife Jane joined the meeting and expressed her interest in the sample titles that Allen had brought along. She had already read some and was interested in the rest. Seeing her enthusiasm, her husband decided to take a chance, and Woolworths placed an order for 63,500 copies. With this confidence exhibited by a major player, other retailers followed suit, and Allen was in business.

Allen Lane’s second idea for how to succeed was in the branding of the series. Rather than relying on individual titles and authors to attract readers’ interest, he wanted to cultivate a reputation for the series itself, so that people would always buy the new one whether or not they had heard of the writer before. Part of this would come from careful selection of titles to include, and indeed securing the rights to republish the first ten titles required intense negotiation. Some of the selections were books The Bodley held the rights for, such as the very first in the series, André Maurois’s Ariel. Agatha Christie’s The Mysterious Affair at Styles — number six — they also had (although that then caused problems and had to be replaced with a different Christie book in later runs). But the rest required other publishers to part with the rights for a fee that wasn’t so exorbitant that it sunk the whole enterprise. Other companies were suspicious that The Bodley Head’s new series would cut into their hardback sales, or damage library borrowing figures. Still, Jonathan Cape provided six titles for a bargain price, arguably the decision that made the whole thing possible. When Allen Lane asked him why he did this, Cape said that “I thought you were bound to go bust, and I thought I’d take 400 quid off you before you did.”

Books secured, Lane was absolutely convinced that the series needed excellent branding if it was to succeed. We’re now very accustomed to book covers as marketing tools, I think, but this was a relatively new concept in the mid 1930s. In this, Lane was very influenced by a couple of existing series: Tauchnitz Editions and the Albatross series, both of which were paperback series from German companies that were read widely on the Continent. Albatross had a striking font-centric cover design and colour coded the books by genre — red for crime, green for travel, orange for literary fiction, and so on. Lane borrowed this idea wholesale. Over a long morning meeting at The Bodley Head’s offices, the brothers and their publishing team thrashed out the visual identity of the new series. They considered a few different animals for the series’s mascot or logo, including a phoenix and a dolphin, until secretary Joan Coles made the suggestion “what about penguins?”. Lane liked the “certain dignified flippancy” the choice of this particular bird suggested, and a young designer in the office, Edward Young was sent off to London Zoo straight away to sketch a penguin for the covers. A font was selected, Gill Sans. Colours were chosen: orange for fiction, pink for travel, blue for biographies, red for plays, and, crucially, green for crime. And as anyone who reads golden age detective fiction can tell you, these colours were to become iconic, emblematic of the books they contain. Say “green penguin” to any book lover, and they will know exactly what you mean. And that effect happened very quickly. On 30th July 1935, the first ten Penguins hatched. By the end of the year, they had sold a million copies.

Paperbacks had a reputation among both publishers and consumers as being disposable, something cheap that would be read once and then thrown away as they started to come apart. But Allen Lane’s vision for Penguin was that people would collect them, enjoying building a library. The different colours for different subjects, as well as the numbered spines, were all aimed at cultivating a “got to catch them all” kind of completism in Penguin’s readers.

After the break: we learn just how well that worked.

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Now, I own a lot of books. So many, indeed, that listeners occasionally express concern that I might one day be crushed by the weight of my own library. But when it comes to the collecting of Penguins, I am a newbie, a rookie, a mere amateur. So I had to call in an expert to help us understand the movement that Allen Lane started with those first ten Penguins in 1935.

Jules: My name is Jules Burt. I run a dedicated vintage paperback YouTube channel called Jules Burt Collections and Unboxings, where we cover lots and lots of mainly pre 1970 vintage paperbacks. In total, I’ve got about 15,000 across all my publishers. But Penguin is the main one with probably about 4,500. And then Pan would be the second biggest one, which is about, probably about 2,000 now, I would think. It just sort of become a passion, really. I’ve never not collected them.

Caroline: This is a mind-boggling collection to me — so many years of dedication and passion have gone into assembling it. As Jules says, Penguin paperbacks, especially the pre-ISBN, pre-1970s ones, are his main focus, although he does collect other series and publishers too. But even his Penguin collection isn’t quite complete.

Jules: I haven’t got all the Penguins. I try and collect them in first edition, and I’ve still got one to find out of the first 1000 books, which is Death on the Borough Council. It was, it’s quite a tricky one to find in first edition because it was a wartime one. It was July 1944, that one, it’s a Josephine Bell. So that’s the last one I need now to finish the first thousand original Penguins in first edition, which itself has been almost a lifetime obsession. You know, it’s taken me 30 years.

Caroline: And that elusive final one, Death on the Borough Council by Josephine Bell? It’s a green Penguin, of course.

Jules: I’ve actually found three last year, and the last one I got was the first paperback of Speedy Death by Gladys Mitchell, which a copy turned up on eBay of all places, and it had a detached cover, because once again, it’s a very fragile wartime one. And I got it for just under 80 pounds, so I was over the moon with that, so, Yeah, the last one, Death of the Borough Council, that went on eBay. It’s the first one I’ve seen in about four years. Went for 350 odd. A little too much to pay for one old Penguin. So I gave that one a miss. I thought, another one will come, come along in time, you know.

Caroline: I love Jules’s attitude to his Penguin collection. It’s a true hobby, not something he’s doing because he thinks it will make money in the future, and he really loves and appreciates these books as objects in their own right. Which is, I think, what Allen Lane and The Bodley Head team originally intended back when they were dreaming up the series in the first place. Holding one now, he says, is like a holding a little piece of that history in your hand.

Jules: There’s something about if you’ve got a book, a period book from the 30s or 40s, It’s a book perhaps you’ve never even read, but it’s lasted 70, 80 plus years now, and you’re reading that original copy. And because particularly the Penguins were so well produced at the time, I mean, they were gorgeous productions, until the war kicked in, of course. But pre war, they’re actually gorgeous bits of book, gorgeous examples of paperbacks. They just feel quite special when you hold them in your hands, you know, reading something that survived all that time.

And, you may be the fifth, 10th person to read the actual copy. But there’s something about having that bit of history there, and reading it as someone would have read it back in the 1930s when it was first published. It’s quite nice that, and that’s a real treat.

Caroline: Something I was really curious to know when I heard about the scale of Jules’s collection was this: does he actually read his Penguins?

Jules: I do actually. Yeah. If I think I’d think twice now about reading a very delicate wartime one with a very, very thin paper. And it just really wouldn’t after all this time, even when I’m sort of cleaning them, I’m going to get a new acquisition. I don’t really give it the, I might bag it up. You’d have to be so careful because the glue starts to come away in that.

So, unless it was a really robust copy, the pre war ones aren’t bad. As I said, they were so well made, they can survive a couple more readings. But the wartime ones would be a definite no no. I would pick up a more recent copy to read for that one. But I have done it. Anything from the 50s up is absolutely fine. I might sometimes pop a plastic cover on it whilst I’m reading it.

Caroline: When I asked Jules whether he had any thoughts on why it is that Penguins inspire this kind of devotion in readers and book collectors, probably more than any other series, he said it was the trust people have in the series and its quality that has really resonated down the decades. To illustrate this, he told me a story he’d encountered in the 1990s, when he was working as a bookseller and was given the task of welcoming Terry Waite to the shop to do a signing of his memoir about being kidnapped in Lebanon for four years.

Jules: I looked after him that day, so when I got him some lunch, and I made a point of reading the book before they came down, and there was a bit in it where he was chained to the radiator, and he’d been begging his captors to bring him some books to read, and they brought him a box of books, but they were in like Arabic, so he didn’t have a clue.

He said, that’s no good. I can’t read those. Get me English books. So they came back a couple of weeks later with a box of Penguins. And he said how his heart lifted. He just knew he was in for such a great read. And he said they got really got him through that time. And I’ve never forgotten that story because it just shows what Penguins were and what they mean to so many people over such a long period of time, almost 90 years.

Caroline: Because the Penguin series did do exactly what Allen Lane and all those other publishing people gathered at that conference about “the New Reading Public” in 1934 had dreamed of. It made high quality literature available in an affordable, portable form, so that more people could own it and read it. And the clever branding of the series made it highly recognisable and collectable. Penguin ran with the idea, branching out into lots of other imprints and series — Pelicans, Puffins, King Penguins, Penguin Classics, and more, all of which in some way touched on the original mission of the company and riffed on the now-famous triband cover design. There were even Penguins made during WW2 that were specially for those serving in the armed forces, and those are now some of the hardest to track down. I’ll let Jules explain.

Jules: They did something called the Forces Book Club, say you had a serviceman abroad, their family member could pay Penguin a fee each month and they would send that family member 10 books in a packet to the regiment. They all had their own unique jackets, so they’re quite exclusive those. There’s 120 of those to collect and nobody we know has got a full set. We know a couple of collectors have got in the 60s, 60 or 70. I’ve got about a dozen or so. There’s none in the British library.

Caroline: But that’s not all. There’s an even rarer Penguin series to collect: the Prisoner of War series.

Jules: The ones that didn’t sell in the Forces Club, they had the covers taken off, new covers put on, and they were sent to prisoner of war camps across Europe. I think they’re the hardest ones of all to get. And some of those are just, you know, a handful of copies. And there’s not even a list of what was actually being produced, but sometimes I’ve got a couple of copies where they’ve got Stalag Luft and it’s a German, you know, prisoner of war camp on because they’ve gone through the camp library and somehow managed to get back to England. And they do say Prisoner of War book service inside. So they’re the very, very rarest ones.

Caroline: Although the Penguin series was originally launched from within The Bodley Head, by 1936 it had become clear that John Lane’s old outfit was not going to survive. It was carrying over £40,000 in debt — about £2 million in today’s money — and even the wild success of the Penguin series could not save it. So the Lanes separated Penguin off as a new company called Penguin Books Ltd and let The Bodley Head go into voluntary liquidation, after which it was bought by a consortium of rivals that included Stanley Unwin and Jonathan Cape. Penguin forged ahead alone, although because of the way that the publishing industry works through mergers and acquisitions, The Bodley Head has since come home. In 1987 it was acquired by Random House, which then in turn in 2013 merged with Penguin to become the behemoth that is Penguin Random House. The Bodley Head now operates as an imprint within that conglomerate, but it’s still the Penguin name that’s above the door.

This is all very far away from where we started, which is with a man who wanted to read a book on a train. So I think it’s fitting that we should return to him at the end.

Jules: I mean, the ultimate Penguin collection is Allen Lane’s personal collection. Although, and this is held in the Bristol Archive. Now, they’re not in the best of condition.

I’ve seen photos of them. I’ve never actually held them. But what he did, every single Penguin book that came out, he would send the author 11 copies, complimentary on publication, and ask for one signed one to be sent back. So, he had every single Penguin, every pelican, every single book. I think it was one pelican that never got signed because they had an argument with the author.

So, his collection is all signed. But, of course, something like my favorite, Hound of the Baskervilles, 111. Conan Doyle had already passed away by 1936. So, what he did with using his book contacts he wrote to Conan Doyle’s publisher, I think it was They went into their archive, found an old letter from Conan Doyle, snipped the signature off the bottom, sent it to Alan Lane so he could paste it into his Penguin, to keep the collection complete with all the signatures in.

Now that’s probably the best collection out there, I would imagine.

Caroline: Allen Lane, the ultimate Penguin collector, who would stop at nothing — not even death — to complete his set. He was greatly prone to self-mythologisation, and some of the stories he used to tell about the creation of the series, including the one about having the idea on the train back from Agatha Christie’s house, have since been disputed by experts. I’ve listed in the episode description the sources I’ve used to make this episode and if you’re interested you can go and assess the differing accounts for yourself. But to zoom out for a moment, I think we can still take in the bigger picture, even if some of the details are blurry. The ideas behind the Penguin series weren’t original. Lots of aspects of it had been tried by other publishers before. But Allen Lane and his colleagues caught a moment and it was their version of the mass market paperback library that took off. It’s penguins that we still collect today. And, as you’re about to hear, it’s the green penguins particularly that I’m about to spend a lot of time reading.

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So, now that we know the history of the green penguin, I can tell you my big plan for a new strand of the podcast. I’m calling it “Green Penguin Book Club”. I’m going to read every green penguin, in order, and make an episode about it. I’ll have a different guest for each one who will join me in reading the book and then we’ll dissect it together and rate it. I’m aiming to do about one of these every two months, so you’ll get them sprinkled in among the normal run of Shedunnit episodes, and if all goes well by the end of this year we’ll have covered the first six green penguins. I hope you’ll be as excited about this new format as I am — I’ve long wanted to have a project like this where I read a book series in order and get that long perspective on it, and I think this one is going to perfectly match the general spirit of the podcast. The list of green penguins includes some books by big names that you will have heard of, and then others by writers that were popular in their day but are now much less well read. And I get to bring in lots of different guests and talk about books with them… I’m just thrilled about this and it’s given me so much energy for the new phase of a podcast that I’ve been doing for over five years now.

We’ll be beginning in the next episode with the first green penguin, which is Penguin number five, The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club by Dorothy L. Sayers. You don’t need to do anything extra to hear it, it will just be appearing on your feed in two weeks’ time just like any other episode. You can also follow the podcast on social media @ShedunnitShow to get Green Penguin Book Club updates between episodes and find out who the guests are going to be ahead of time. You’re also very welcome to read along with us – I want to include a section in each episode with contributions from listeners, and I’ll be explaining more about how that’s going to work next time.

That’s all for today. I’ll see you next time for our first Green Penguin Book Club.

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This episode of Shedunnit was produced and hosted by me, Caroline Crampton. My guest was Jules Burt, and you can find his YouTube channel at youtube.com/@julesburt. Jules and I talked for a lot longer than I was able to fit in this episode, and I will edit the whole conversation and release it as a bonus episode for the Shedunnit Book Club, so to hear that join now at shedunnitbookclub.com/join. You can find a full list of the books we mentioned in this episode at shedunnitshow.com/thegreenpenguin. I publish transcripts of every episode including this one; find them all at shedunnitshow.com/transcripts.

The Green Penguin Book Club kicks off in the next episode with the first crime book to appear in the series — number five, The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club by Dorothy L. Sayers. Make sure you’re following Shedunnit in your podcast app to hear that as soon as it is released, and be sure to tag us @ShedunnitShow on social media if you’re reading along.

Shedunnit is edited by Euan McAleece. Production assistance from Leandra Griffith. Member support for the Shedunnit Book Club from Connor McLoughlin.

Thanks for listening.
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