A Companion to the History of the Book (63 page)

A more modern method of selling still cheaper and more popular reprints was pioneered by Allen Lane’s Penguin Books. Lane certainly did not invent the paperback: in the nineteenth century, American dime novels, the Tauchnitz series of Germany, and most books published in France had paper covers. Penguins were very similar in format to (and undoubtedly inspired by) Albatross Books, a paperback series that had been published out of Germany for the British tourist market since 1932. Like Tauchnitz and Albatross, Lane purchased paperback reprint rights from various publishers and authors, the first British publisher to do so. But his real innovation lay in his marketing strategy: very low price (sixpence), very high volume (initial print-runs of at least 20,000, with a break-even point at 17,500), and sales though unconventional outlets (Woolworth’s). Penguins were perhaps the first truly classless books in Britain: affordable for everyone, yet packaged in an attractively democratic format that would appeal to all readers, however genteel. And Lane chose authors who combined literary talent with popular appeal: the first batch of Penguins in 1935 included Mary Webb, Dorothy L. Sayers, Compton Mackenzie, and Ernest Hemingway’s
A Farewell to Arms.
Penguin Classics began in 1945 with a prose translation of
The Odyssey,
which sold more than a million copies in fifteen years. Soon Penguins had serious competitors. Pan Books was launched in 1944; by 1965, it was selling 21 million copies, of which James Bond was responsible for 6 million. In 1969, Penguin was still the market leader, selling 27 million paperbacks, but it had to share the field with Fontana (13 million), Corgi (13 million), and Panther (9 million); the last had been launched by two RAF veterans with no publishing experience.

Modern mass-market publishing inevitably produced a nostalgic reaction: the private press movement. When William Morris founded the Kelmscott Press in 1891, he radically rethought the art of printing, which he mastered from scratch at a fairly advanced age. Based on a careful study of incunabula, he designed type founts and watermarks, secured supplies of fine papers, and even insisted on ink made from traditional ingredients. His typography involved eliminating white space through narrow leading and tight word spacing; integrating and balancing text, ornaments, and illustrations; and designing facing pages as a visual whole. Many of the fifty-three titles produced by his hand presses were works of medieval literature, some of them originally printed by William Caxton. As a socialist influenced by Marx, Morris was convinced that the alienation of labor could be ended only by reviving handcraft methods of production. He paid his workers reasonably well and gave them considerable autonomy. However, Morris was still in charge of the press, and he was not completely averse to using modern print technology, such as electrotypes. And, of course, like all the best private printers, he produced expensive works for affluent collectors.

In 1898, C. R. Ashbee bought William Morris’s two Albion presses and carried on the Kelmscott tradition with his own Essex House Press. T. J. Cobden-Sanderson set up a bindery to serve the Kelmscott Press, and when it closed, he established his own Doves Press. Its most famous book, the Doves Bible (1903–5), employed strikingly clean and simple typography that contrasted sharply with Kelmscott ornateness. C. H. St. John Hornby’s Ashendene Press printed an edition of Dante (1906–9), which has been compared to the Kelmscott Chaucer. James Guthrie bought one of Kelmscott presses for his own Pear Tree Press, but went much farther than Morris in abolishing the division of labor: for the most part, he edited, hand printed, and marketed his own books. As managed by Elizabeth Yeats and her brother, William Butler Yeats, the Dun Emer Press (later renamed the Cuala Press) combined an Arts and Crafts movement sensibility with Irish cultural nationalism and feminism (the production workers were women). The Gregynog Press (founded 1927) emphasized Welsh culture and exceptionally fine bindings. And the gorgeous colors of French Impressionism were introduced into English typography by the Eragny Press, begun in 1894 by the husband-and-wife team of Lucien and Esther Pissarro.

Book artistry was not necessarily incompatible with mass marketing. J. M. Dent had been a master bookbinder, and his early “Everyman’s Library” volumes were designed in a William Morris style by Reginald Knowles, with hand-lettered titles and floral ornaments stamped on the spine in gold. St. John Hornby not only created the Ashendene Press, he was also a partner of W. H. Smith, which would retain Eric Gill to design a distinctive Trajan type for their shop fronts, hire Douglas Cockerell to run a quality bindery, and acquire Bernard Newdigate’s Arden Press. The latter published a number of finely printed guides on bookshop management, emphasizing the importance of attractive interiors and window dressing. Smith’s appreciated the importance of aesthetics in modern bookselling: the cluttered seediness of their nineteenth-century railway bookstalls gave way to a more tasteful, clean décor that appealed to twentieth-century consumers.

One distinctively modern method of book marketing bypassed bookshops altogether. In 1905, the Times Book Club had been established as a circulation-boosting device: subscribers to the newspaper were entitled to borrow books from the club or purchase them at a large discount. The first true UK book club was the Book Society, founded in 1929. Unlike its American predecessors, the Book of the Month Club and the Literary Guild, the Book Society did not print books itself: it purchased them in bulk from publishers and retailed them at the net price to its members. Victor Gollancz’s Left Book Club (founded 1936) published original books with distinctive orange covers and had 50,000 members by 1939. His club was not (strictly speaking) Communist, but before 1940 it rarely strayed far from the party line. Its most famous book, George Orwell’s
The Road to Wigan Pier,
aroused some indignation with its criticisms of the Soviet Union: Gollancz only published it after adding an apologetic preface. The Readers’ Union (founded 1937) took the step of offering reprinted books at steeply discounted prices. Not until 1968 did the Publishers’ Association and the Booksellers’ Association agree to allow book clubs to publish books for their members simultaneously with trade editions available in bookstores. Book clubs proliferated in the 1960s, many of them under the umbrella of W. H. Smith. But since most readers had access to good bookshops, clubs never accounted for more than 5 percent of book sales in this period, far less than in the United States.

Of course, book readers were not necessarily book buyers. A 1940 survey found that while 55 percent of working-class adults read books, only 24 percent bought books, and just 16 percent patronized public libraries. In this social stratum, books were still often borrowed from workmates, inherited from grandparents, won as school prizes, or scavenged from rubbish bins. Many families acquired the complete works of Shakespeare or Dickens by clipping promotional coupons from cigarette packets and newspapers. For middle-class patrons in search of light mysteries and romances, W. H. Smith and Boots offered circulating libraries. Boots Booklovers Library flourished from 1898 to 1960. During World War II, the company had a million subscribers and purchased 1.25 million volumes a year, which made it a force to be reckoned with in the publishing world.

The Public Libraries Act of 1850 permitted (but did not require) localities to levy property taxes to support libraries. At first, only a few were created, and they were often intimidating places, where readers had to ask librarians to fetch books from closed stacks. Only after 1890 was there a characteristically modern effort to make libraries user-friendly In 1894, Clerkenwell inaugurated the first lending library with open stacks, though most libraries did not adopt that practice until after World War I. Open access did not dramatically increase book thefts, as pessimists had predicted, but it could result in overcrowding, as new patrons flocked to the shelves. Around the turn of the century, Croydon public library pioneered innovative outreach activities, including public lectures, a magazine for readers, exhibits of technical books, a lending library of photographs, an index to periodical literature, topical reading lists, and a public information service. After 1920, the word “information” became more and more common in library literature, emphasizing the provision of the kind of data necessary to a modern industrial economy. In the 1920s, library vans were introduced in rural areas, where a great effort was made to set up village branch libraries. The first urban bookmobile, or “bibliobus,” was inaugurated in Manchester in 1931.

All these efforts contributed to a striking increase in library coverage and usage. In 1884–5, just 23 percent of the British population were served by public libraries, rising to 60 percent by 1913–14 (though only 46 percent in Wales) and nearly universal service by 1934–5. In 1875–7, libraries annually issued only 0.92 books per head of population in the areas they served, increasing to 1.33 issues in 1913–14, 3.69 issues in 1934–5, and 11.67 issues in 1971–2.

Public libraries were a countercyclical business: usage surged in economic slumps and declined again when prosperity returned. In the 1920s and 1930s, workers “on the dole” spent much of their time in the stacks, where they could easily get through three or four books a week. Cheap crime thrillers, romances, and westerns could be had at two-penny circulating libraries, which proliferated in the slums: in York in 1938, they loaned out half as many volumes as the public libraries. Although many librarians feared that the picture palaces were distracting the masses from true literature, a movie version of a classic could send readers scrambling to borrow the book, as was the case with
Romeo and Juliet
(1937) and
Pride and Prejudice
(1940).

A 1962–3 survey of London found that, while professionals, executives, and managers made up 17 percent of the national population, they accounted for 45.8 percent of library members. Manual or lower clerical workers, 58 percent of the total population, were just 33.1 percent of library members. This represented a dramatic shift from the Victorian period: in 1876, Leeds reported that 81 percent of its lending library patrons were working class.

Because public libraries were slow to penetrate the coal valleys of South Wales, colliers set up their own libraries, more than a hundred by 1934. They were supported by deductions from their wages and (after 1920) by taxes on coal production. The average collection was about 3,000 volumes, though the impressive Tredegar Workmen’s Institute circulated as many as 100,000 annually, and at one point devoted £60 of its £300 acquisitions budget to philosophy. Mainly these libraries loaned out thrillers, romances, westerns, and other popular fiction, but there was also demand for English classics and (in a few leftist coal towns) Marxist literature. Cooperative societies also sponsored workers’ libraries: the Royal Arsenal branch at Woolwich had a collection of 10,000 volumes in the 1930s. Nearly all of these independent proletarian libraries were defunct by 1970, victims of universal public-library service and the decline of a working-class tradition of intellectual self-improvement.

That tradition was still very much alive in the first half of the twentieth century. After the first large bloc of Labour Party MPs was elected in 1906, the
Review of Reviews
asked them which books and authors had shaped their worldviews: John Ruskin was named most often, followed by Charles Dickens, the Bible, Thomas Carlyle, Henry George, Walter Scott, John Stuart Mill, and William Shakespeare (very few mentioned Karl Marx). A 1940 study found that in working-class secondary schools, where education ended at the age of 14, students averaged six to seven books a month outside required school reading. Impressively, 62 percent of boys and 84 percent of girls read poetry outside school: they were partial to Kipling, Longfellow, Masefield, Blake, Tennyson, and Wordsworth. Fervent literary discussions could take place in mineshafts, as one Nottinghamshire collier recalled: “Tha wants ter read Shelley’s stuff. That’s
poetry]”
(quoted in Rose 2001: 242). But employers did not always approve of well-read workers. Housemaid Margaret Powell was fond of Dickens, Conrad, and Proust, so she asked the lady of the house:

if I could borrow a book from her library to read, and I can now see the surprised look on her face. She said, “Yes, of course, certainly you can, Margaret,” adding “but I didn’t know you could read.” They knew that you breathed and you slept and you worked, but they didn’t know that you
read.
Such a thing was beyond comprehension. They thought that in your spare time you sat and gazed into space, or looked at
Peg’s Paper
or the
Crimson Circle.
You could almost see them reporting you to their friends. “Margaret’s a good cook, but unfortunately she reads. Books, you know.” (quoted in Rose 2001: 25)

Granted, Margaret was hardly a typical case. Which books, then, were average British readers buying and reading? Those are two different questions, and the answers depend on the methodologies used by historians. Collating eighty-three public library catalogues published between 1883 and 1912, Simon Eliot (1992) concluded that the most heavily stocked novelists were Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Walter Scott, Mrs. Henry Wood, and Charles Dickens, followed by Margaret Oliphant, E. Bulwer Lytton, Charlotte Yonge, and R. M. Ballantyne. Note the prominence of female authors. Troy Bassett and Christina Walter (2001) used booksellers’ reports published in
The Bookman,
a literary monthly, to reconstruct bestseller lists for 1891–1906, and arrived at different results. Their top ten authors (in descending order) were S. R. Crockett, Marie Corelli, Rudyard Kipling, Ian Maclaren, Stanley Weyman, Robert Louis Stevenson, Arthur Conan Doyle, Elizabeth Thorneycroft Fowler, J. M. Barrie, and Mrs. Humphry Ward. Note the insularity: the most popular writers were all British. The bestselling foreign author was Emile Zola, in fourteenth place, in spite (or perhaps because) of efforts to censor his work. Far lower on the list were Mark Twain and Leo Tolstoy. Eighty years after his death, Walter Scott was still in fifteenth place. Nonfiction bestsellers predictably included war and imperial memoirs, as well as a guide to bodybuilding by Eugene Sandow, but also some remarkably serious philosophy and religion, such as A. J. Balfour’s
The Foundations of Belief
and Bishop Charles Gore’s
Lux Mundi.