escenic (original) (raw)

Allen Lane, the founder of the Penguin paperback, is one of our country’s greatest populist educators.

He was both brilliant and normal, a charismatic bore, a man who “never turned the page of a book” (his own words), yet was passionate about getting people to read. He changed publishing 75 years ago when he started selling good books for the price of a packet of cigarettes.

If anyone can flesh out the contradictory figure of Lane, it’s the writer Michael Morpurgo, who attempts just that in a fascinating Radio 4 programme on Thursday. Morpurgo met Lane’s eldest daughter, Clare, in Corfu in 1963 and, at the age of 19, married her. He knew his father-in-law for seven difficult years (“Tensions finally melted in the last year”) before Lane died of cancer. “He wasn’t happy about the marriage, so it was a challenge. If only I had known then how interesting a challenge it was to be,” Morpurgo tells me.

With him when we speak is Clare, who recounts happy childhood tales: a party in their Middlesex garden organised by her father at which a baby elephant appeared; and a cycling trip across France with just her father and DK Broster’s novel The Flight of the Heron: “My father didn’t read but, somehow, he could produce from his pocket exactly the right book at the right time.”

Lane published DH Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, which sold 2.1 million copies in its first year. “He was a terrier snapping at the establishment,” Morpurgo says. Yet years later, the same man stole out in the dark to empty a Penguin warehouse full of books of French illustrations and burn them, because he’d decided they were sacrilegious. Stories like this make for a fascinating riddle of a programme; a series of juicy anecdotes that refuse to align into a coherent portrait.

- Penguin, Puffin and the Paperback Revolution is on Radio 4 on Thursday at 11.30am