Allen Lane
Encyclopedia
Sir Allen Lane was a British
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...

 publisher who founded Penguin Books
Penguin Books
Penguin Books is a publisher founded in 1935 by Sir Allen Lane and V.K. Krishna Menon. Penguin revolutionised publishing in the 1930s through its high quality, inexpensive paperbacks, sold through Woolworths and other high street stores for sixpence. Penguin's success demonstrated that large...

, bringing high quality paperback
Paperback
Paperback, softback or softcover describe and refer to a book by the nature of its binding. The covers of such books are usually made of paper or paperboard, and are usually held together with glue rather than stitches or staples...

 fiction and non-fiction to the mass market.

Early life and family

Allen Lane Williams was born in Bristol
Bristol
Bristol is a city, unitary authority area and ceremonial county in South West England, with an estimated population of 433,100 for the unitary authority in 2009, and a surrounding Larger Urban Zone with an estimated 1,070,000 residents in 2007...

 to Camilla (née Lane) and Samuel Williams, and studied at Bristol Grammar School
Bristol Grammar School
Bristol Grammar School is a co-educational independent school in Clifton, Bristol, England. The school was founded in 1532 by two brothers, Robert and Nicholas Thorne....

. In 1919 he joined the publishing company Bodley Head as an apprentice to his uncle and founder of the company John Lane
John Lane (publisher)
-Biography:Originally from Devon, where he was born into a farming family, Lane moved to London already in his teens. While working as a clerk at the Railway Clearing House, he acquired knowledge as an autodidact....

. In the process, he and the rest of his family changed their surname to Lane to retain the childless John Lane's company as a family firm. Lane married Lettice Lucy Orr on 28 June 1941 and had three daughters, the older two of whom were Clare
Clare Morpurgo
Clare Morpurgo MBE, née Lane, is the wife of British author Michael Morpurgo.She is the oldest daughter of Allen Lane, the founder of Penguin books....

 and Christine. He was knighted in 1962.

Career as a publisher

He rose quickly in the business becoming managing editor in 1925 following the death of his uncle. After conflict with the board of directors who were wary at first — for fear of being prosecuted — of publishing James Joyce
James Joyce
James Augustine Aloysius Joyce was an Irish novelist and poet, considered to be one of the most influential writers in the modernist avant-garde of the early 20th century...

's controversial book Ulysses
Ulysses (novel)
Ulysses is a novel by the Irish author James Joyce. It was first serialised in parts in the American journal The Little Review from March 1918 to December 1920, and then published in its entirety by Sylvia Beach on 2 February 1922, in Paris. One of the most important works of Modernist literature,...

, Lane left in 1936 to set up Penguin Books
Penguin Books
Penguin Books is a publisher founded in 1935 by Sir Allen Lane and V.K. Krishna Menon. Penguin revolutionised publishing in the 1930s through its high quality, inexpensive paperbacks, sold through Woolworths and other high street stores for sixpence. Penguin's success demonstrated that large...

. The legend goes that on a train journey back from visiting Agatha Christie
Agatha Christie
Dame Agatha Christie DBE was a British crime writer of novels, short stories, and plays. She also wrote romances under the name Mary Westmacott, but she is best remembered for her 66 detective novels and 14 short story collections , and her successful West End plays.According to...

 in 1934, Lane found himself on an Exeter station platform with nothing available worth reading. He conceived of paperback editions of literature of proven quality which would be cheap enough to be sold from a vending machine
Vending machine
A vending machine is a machine which dispenses items such as snacks, beverages, alcohol, cigarettes, lottery tickets, consumer products and even gold and gems to customers automatically, after the customer inserts currency or credit into the machine....

; the first was set up in Charing Cross Road
Charing Cross Road
Charing Cross Road is a street in central London running immediately north of St Martin-in-the-Fields to St Giles Circus and then becomes Tottenham Court Road...

 and dubbed the "Penguincubator". Lane was also well aware of the Hamburg
Hamburg
-History:The first historic name for the city was, according to Claudius Ptolemy's reports, Treva.But the city takes its modern name, Hamburg, from the first permanent building on the site, a castle whose construction was ordered by the Emperor Charlemagne in AD 808...

 publisher Albatross Books
Albatross Books
Albatross Books was a German publishing house based in Hamburg that produced the first modern mass market paperback books.Albatross was founded in 1932 by John Holroyd-Reece, Max Wegner and Kurt Enoch. The name was chosen because "Albatross' is the same word in many European languages...

 and adopted many of its innovations. The paperback venture was extremely successful, and he expanded into other areas such as Puffin Books
Puffin Books
Puffin Books is the children's imprint of British publishers Penguin Books. Since the 1960s it has been the largest publisher of children's books in the UK and much of the English-speaking world.-Early history:...

 in 1940 and the Penguin Classics series in 1945. Lane was responsible for the decision to publish an unexpurgated edition of D. H. Lawrence
D. H. Lawrence
David Herbert Richards Lawrence was an English novelist, poet, playwright, essayist, literary critic and painter who published as D. H. Lawrence. His collected works represent an extended reflection upon the dehumanising effects of modernity and industrialisation...

's Lady Chatterley's Lover
Lady Chatterley's Lover
Lady Chatterley's Lover is a novel by D. H. Lawrence, first published in 1928. The first edition was printed privately in Florence, Italy with assistance from Pino Orioli; it could not be published openly in the United Kingdom until 1960...

as a means of testing the Obscene Publications Act 1959
Obscene Publications Act 1959
The Obscene Publications Act 1959 is an Act of Parliament of the United Kingdom Parliament that significantly reformed the law related to obscenity. Prior to the passage of the Act, the law on publishing obscene materials was governed by the common law case of R v Hicklin, which had no exceptions...

.

In 1965, during an attempt by chief editor Tony Godwin
Tony Godwin
Anthony James Wylie "Tony" Godwin was a British publisher of the 1960s/1970s. His contribution to the publishing industry is recognized in the form of the Tony Godwin Memorial Trust....

 and the board of directors to remove him, Lane stole a book's entire print run and burnt it. (The book was called Massacre and was by the French cartoonist Siné
Siné
Maurice Sinet , known as Siné, is a French cartoonist.As a young man he studied drawing and graphic arts, while earning a living as a cabaret singer. After his military service he started publishing his drawings and also worked as a photo-retoucher for porn magazines. His first published drawing...

: it was reportedly deeply offensive.) Lane fired Godwin, and retained control of Penguin, but was forced to retire shortly afterwards after being diagnosed with bowel cancer. He died in 1970 at Northwood, Middlesex
Middlesex
Middlesex is one of the historic counties of England and the second smallest by area. The low-lying county contained the wealthy and politically independent City of London on its southern boundary and was dominated by it from a very early time...

.

External links

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