Books: Cheap Books

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U. S. publishers claim that books cannot be sold cheaply, point to Modern Age, which a year and a half ago sank a fortune in less-than-a-dollar books, is only now breaking even. Publishers say that U. S. living standards are too high, that even in bad times U. S. citizens are anti-Woolworth about books.

English publishers used to say the same thing—until 1935. That year, in London, a handsome young man named Allen Lane, 33-year-old son of an architect, quit his job in his uncle's publishing house (the famed Bodley Head) and started publishing pocket-size, paperbound Penguin books. His original capital: £100. His publishing office: a crypt beneath a Soho church. Tables were tomb tops; storage space was empty tombs. The first six months he sold over a million copies, including such titles as Hemingway's Farewell to Arms, André Maurois' Ariel, Mowrer's Germany Puts the Clock Back.

By 1936 he was selling 35,000 copies a day, big delivery trucks were rolling in and out of the churchyard, and Allen Lane had become the most spectacular success in British publishing history. The price of Penguin books: 6d (12¢) a copy; the profit on each: 1d.

Published at the rate of ten books a month, in first printings of at least 50,000 copies, Penguin books now sell 12,500,000 copies a year. But much bigger things are in the offing. Allen Lane is now on a four-month tour of India and the Near East. If those markets look as good as they sound, he will begin his biggest venture yet: publishing Penguin books in Basic English, a simple 850-word vocabulary sifted out by Orthologist-Critic Charles Kay Ogden. Besides the prospect of getting rich while combining two of the liveliest ideas in England, Publisher Lane may also point the way to matching, in the democracies, the vast book editions made possible under dictatorships through State-controlled publishing houses.