Plain Talk

By Mursi Saad El-Din

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I still remember how Penguin Books had celebrated its sixth decade 10 years ago, the Arts and Books Review having dedicated its cover story to the subject. Ten years on, John Walsh, a writer I much enjoy reading, gives the history of this popular edition launched by Allen Lane 70 years back.

When I read the article, I hurried to my home library and brought out the Penguin books I had, with their different colours: Graham Greene's novels, in yellow and orange, Ibsen's plays in brown, Flaubert in black, popular science in green.

In 1935 the publishing trade was "struggling to emerge from recession", and due to the then high price of hardbacks, their sale was flagging. It was then that Allen Lane got the idea of starting his paperback books. John Walsh takes us back to 1938 when the first Penguins were published, serving as both a "retail phenomenon and a social watershed".

Lane could foresee a future reading public that could not afford the high price of the paperbacks. In fact there was a great increase in the readers, especially after the end of World War II.

In his introduction to Return to Oasis, an anthology of the war poetry, Lawrence Durrell writes about the desire among British troops in the Western Desert to read. There was a shortage of books, since none were coming from London. Durrell tells the funny story of a bookshop in Cairo which was swindled by a wholesaler in London after the owner of the bookshop sent a blank check asking for several crates of unspecified stock.

Durrell then describes how the London bookseller off- loaded a mountain of unreadable 17th-century theology books, memoirs and sermons, to his Cairo colleague. "I saw with misgiving," writes Durrell, "this whole wall of dreadful indigestible fare exposed to human view in the Cairo bookshop. Who on earth would wade through all this stuff?" Two days later, however, the New Zealand Division arrived. "I cannot say if they were all divinity students or curates in the bud," proceeds Durrell, "but all I can attest to is the disappearance of all the fat unreadable tomes in a matter of twenty-four hours. I had a wild vision of the desert being strewn with Bishop Doddridge's sermons in twenty volumes."

I am recounting this story to demonstrate the dire need for books. In fact, it was this need and the problem of transport from England which led to the wartime flourishment of English books printing in Cairo. In fact, Penguin published a number of their titles in the Egyptian capital with Schindler bookshop. This is a fact which, somehow, is not mentioned in John Walsh's article and I even wonder if he knows it at all.

But to go back to the Penguin adventure. Allen Lane knew he was taking a risk in selling books for six pence. He realised that in order to cover the publishing expenses and make a profit he had to sell 17 000 copies of each book. "It was a huge gamble," says Walsh, "and it worked."

Almost overnight new readers were created. Their outlets were not only bookshops but large department stores like Woolworth's. In the first four days of the appearance of the paperbacks 150 000 copies were sold, a million in the first four months, and triple that sum by the end of the year.

According to Walsh even Allen Lane himself was puzzled. "Who would have imagined that, even at six pence, there was a thirsty public anxious to buy thousands of books on science, sociology, economics, archaeology, astronomy and other equally serious subjects. And so this is how Allen Lane built the Penguin Empire.

In conclusion I would like to mention that we had a similar experience in Egypt, with the publication of Iqraa books by Dar Al-Maaref. This paperback series which cost a few piastres can be regarded as a miniature Penguin with a great number of important titles.