PENGUIN BOOKS

After a year of internal strife, Penguin was picking up steam in 1946. Penguin differentiated itself from its competitors by publishing titles and authors that other paperback publishers considered too literary or risky, including works by foreign writers. But it also published mysteries and popular fiction.

Penguin Books had started up in the US almost simultaneously with Pocket Books in 1939 but was riven by ongoing differences between its American management and British parent company. Ian Ballantine who had originally headed the American operations had left Penguin in 1945 to start Bantam (more here), taking much of the editorial staff and several lucrative contracts with him. American Penguin now was in the hands of Kurt Enoch, who had started the paperback craze with Albatross Books in his native Germany, joined by American Victor Weybright, whom Allen Lane, head of the English parent company, had met when Weybright worked for the Office of War Information in London. Enoch was in a dispute with Lane in 1945 over his promised ownership share.

Despite its problems, Penguin sales were good in 1946 thanks to a robust market for paperbacks. By then, Enoch had settled his quarrel with Lane over his role in the company. At the beginning of the year, Penguin launched a new cover design and announced an aggressive promotion campaign. The company also launched Pelican books in America, a non-fiction line, early in 1946 and, at the end of the year, began publishing translations of classics. The new American Penguin books had the same dimensions of the British Penguin books, which were taller than other American paperbacks. Ballantine had resisted this change, arguing that changing the size would create display problems at retail. Genres were now indicated by the geometric shapes surrounding the new dancing penguin logo rather than by the color of the cover as in the past. By the end of the year, American Penguin had its first million seller with Erskine Caldwell’s God’s Little Acre, a landmark celebrated with a dinner in honor of the author in November.

All was not rosy, however. Lane was still unhappy that his American subsidiary had illustrations on the covers of their books and he did not approve of some of the edgier American novelists like Caldwell, James T. Farrell and James M. Cain that Enoch and Weybright were publishing. God's Little Acre was exactly the sort of book that Lane believed Penguin should not be publishing. Lane sneeringly suggested that his American partners should start a new line, Porno Books, for their authors. Lane believed strongly in brand identity. In England, Penguin book covers all looked alike with no illustrations, only typography, with the exception of a few wartime special editions. Lane believed that readers would buy Penguin books because they knew what they were getting. He feared that his American partners were diluting brand recognition by using cover illustrations and vulgarizing the brand by publishing authors who did not fit in with the Penguin identity.

The American executives argued that they had more competition in the States for display space than Lane did in England and the American target audience was less familiar with the books and authors that Lane preferred than the suburban riders of British Rail whom Lane targeted. They strongly believed that Penguin books needed to have cover illustrations to sell in drugstores and at neighborhood newsstands. The publishing game was changing as big money moved into the gentleman’s realm of publishing and the marketing people increasingly were running the show. Paperbacks were leading the change.

The Penguin book illustrations, however, were tasteful, simple and bold, bordering on the surreal, a far cry from the garish illustrations that were beginning to appear on the covers of some of the books the competition published. The covers from this time by Robert Jonas, who had been involved with the abstract expressionists but made his living in commercial art, are particularly noteworthy.

Eventually the ongoing disagreements on editing and marketing direction led again to a parting of the ways. This time it was Lane who bowed out. In 1948, Enoch and Weybright took over ownership of American Penguin, which they renamed New American Library. It would become a major paperback publisher under the Signet and Mentor imprints. Enoch and Weybright later would have a bitter falling out with each other when the Times Mirror company purchased New American Library in 1960. Penguin reentered the American market in 1950 with an import subsidiary headquartered in Baltimore. Eventually the company resumed publishing books with the Penguin and Pelican imprints in the US. In 1987 it purchased New American Library completing the circle.

The Penguin titles that appeared early in 1946 were an eclectic lot. The dates in parentheses are the years the books were originally published in hardcover.

Detective and Mystery Stories

    • The Cask (1920) - Freeman Wills Crofts. One of the first novels of the Golden Age of British crime fiction. In this book a Scotland Yard detective unravels a complex case involving a murder that had been revealed when a shipping cask fell from its sling while being unloaded on the London docks. In 1946, Crofts published The Death of a Train, about the derailment of a train by Nazi agents.

    • The Patience of Maigret (1939) - Georges Simenon. The book Included the stories “A Battle of Nerves” and “A Face for a Clue,” featuring Simenon’s famous creation, Inspector Maigret. Simenon, a Belgian, moved to North America in 1945, spending 10 years in Canada and the US. He was a frequent visitor to New York City, which became the setting of three Maigret stories in the mid-1940s.

    • Dead Reckoning (1943)- Francis Bonnamy. This mystery was one of a series featuring Chicago criminologist Peter Utley Shane. In this novel he investigates three linked murders at the Library of Congress and along the banks of the Potomac. Francis Bonnamy is both a fictional character, Shane’s Dr. Watson, in the novel, as well as the pen name for author Audrey Boyers Walz.

    • The Rasp (1924) - Philip MacDonald. This was the novel that introduced the character of Colonel Anthony Gethryn, a former British secret service officer turned amateur detective and occasional newspaper correspondent. In this story, he investigates the death of a cabinet minister.

    • Malice in Wonderland (1940) - Nicholas Blake, a pen name for British Poet Laureate Cecil Day Lewis, father of actor Daniel Day Lewis. Erudite detective Nigel Strangeways seeks to find the identity of the Mad Hatter before his increasingly malicious pranks at a newly opened working-class holiday camp turn deadly.

British Fiction

    • A Passage to India (1924) - E.M. Forster. The modern classic about British colonialists in India during the early years of the independence movement.

    • The Lovely Lady - D.H. Lawrence. A collection of short stories by Lawrence including the title story and “The Rocking Horse Winner.” Later in the year. Penguin published Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley's Lover, but in the expurgated version. The more explicit original was banned in the United States until 1959.

    • Orlando (1928) - Virginia Woolf. The remarkable adventures of a young man who switches genders and never ages from the Elizabethan era to the modern day.

Foreign Fiction

    • The Good Soldier Schweik (1923)- Jaroslav Hasek. A dark, satirical anti-war novel about an inept soldier in the Austro-Hungarian Army during World War One. Hasek died before completing the work.

    • The Turning Wheels (1937) - Stuart Cloete. An historical novel about the wagon train trek of the Boers from British-controlled Cape Town to the Transvaal and the friction between them and the Africans they displaced. It was an international bestseller that was banned in South Africa, Cloete’s homeland.

    • Bread and Wine (1937)— Ignazio Silone. A young Italian revolutionary disguises himself as a Catholic priest after being hounded by the Fascist police and comes to reject the Communist Party as well. Silone, whose real name was Secondine Tranquilli, was a founding member of the Italian Communist Party. He was expelled from the Party in 1930, after moving to Switzerland and criticizing Stalin. Recently uncovered documents suggest that he had been an informant for the Italian police in the early years of the Mussolini regime. His brother, who was arrested for his Communist Party activity, died in 1931 from prison beatings. During the war, Silone worked with the OSS and with the Italian resistance. He was elected to the Italian parliament in 1946 as a Socialist.

American Fiction

    • Manhattan Transfer (1925)-John Dos Passos . Overlapping stories tell the story of Manhattan from the Gilded Age to the Jazz Age. In 1946, Dos Passos was well along in his transition from a supporter of Communism to a conservative foe of Stalin and the Communist Party.

    • Pal Joey (1940)-John O'Hara. This novel about a second-rate nightclub performer and first-rate heel began as a series of New Yorker short stories written as letters from the amiable, immoral protagonist. It was the basis of a 1940 Broadway musical and a 1957 movie.

    • God's Little Acre (1933)- Erskine Caldwell. The New York Society for the Suppression of Vice had Caldwell prosecuted for obscenity when this steamy novel about poor farmers and mill workers in the South was first published. Caldwell won the case and sued the organization but the affair established Caldwell with the public as a writer of dirty books. The Society was more successful in 1946 in having New York City ban Edmund Wilson’s Memoirs of Hecate Count, which was still available and on the bestseller lists this week. Erskine’s novel was a case study in the success of the paperback format. By 1939, it had sold 8,300 copies in its original 1933 Viking hardcover edition and 66,650 copies in a subsequent Modern Library hardcover edition. The Grosset & Dunlop budget-priced reprint edition in 1940 sold 150,000 copies. Penguin sold 3.5-million copies in paperback between March 1946 and January 1948 and the book continued to be a paperback bestseller for years afterwards. The Penguin cover by Robert Jonas showed a rural scene viewed through a hole in a fence. This ushered in a host of “peephole” covers from Penguin and its competitors.

    • Thunder on the Left* (1925) - Christopher Morley. In this whimsical fantasy, which had nothing to do with politics, a boy wonders at his birthday party what it would be like to be an adult. When the party guests gather again 30 years later, they have all become adults but magically he is still a child but with an adult body. Morley was a prodigious and popular writer and a founder of Saturday Review of Literature and the Baker Street Irregulars, but he is probably best known for his 1939 bestseller, Kitty Foyle, a daring novel for the time about a pregnant, unwed woman, made into a movie with Ginger Rogers.

    • Vein of Iron (1935) - Ellen Glasgow. This novel is about a defrocked minister’s family in rural Virginia from the beginning of the twentieth century to the Depression. Glasgow, like Morley, straddled the line between “serious” and “popular” literature. She won the Pulitzer Prize in 1942 for In This Our Life. She died in November 1945 at 72.

    • Winesburg, Ohio (1919) - Sherwood Anderson. This modernist classic is a cycle of short stories about the residents of a small Ohio town. Anderson died in 1941 after swallowing a toothpick on a cruise.

    • Martin Eden (1909) -Jack London,. A working class man in Oakland. California, attempts to become a writer.

    • The Unvanquished (1942) - Howard Fast . This was a fictionalized account of George Washington and the Continental Army in the bleak days of 1776 between the British victory in New York, when it seemed the cause would be lost, and the daring crossing of the Delaware. This was just one of many Fast titles in the market at this time.

    • Back Street (1931) - Fannie Hurst. This was the melodramatic story of a woman who sacrifices her respectability for the love of a married man. Irene Dunne and John Boles starred in the 1932 film version and Charles Boyer and Margaret Sullavan in the 1941 remake. It was filmed again in 1961 with Susan Hayward and John Gavin. A “woman’s writer,” Hurst was no critic favorite but had many fans in her heyday.

    • Mildred Pierce (1941) -James M. Cain . A single mother starts a restaurant business and raises an ungrateful daughter who brings her grief. Joan Crawford won the Academy Award in 1946 for her portrayal of the character in the 1945 movie version. The recent HBO miniseries was a lot closer to the plot of the book which, unlike the movie, had no murder and no punishment for the wicked at the end.

    • Heavenly Discourse (1927)- Charles Erskine Scott Wood. This former bestseller was a collection of satirical essays written as dialogues in heaven involving God, Jesus, Mark Twain, Tom Paine, Teddy Roosevelt and other famous historical personalities. The author, who had died in 1944 at 91, was a fascinating character. He had fought in the Nez Pierce War of 1877, where he befriended Chief Joseph and publicized, and likely wrote or at least embellished, the famous words attributed to Chief Joseph that included the line “I will fight no more forever.” Wood was a pacifist and a radical libertarian who associated with the anarchists of early twentieth century Greenwich Village. As an attorney, he represented Emma Goldman and wrote for radical journals. He originally wrote many of the dialogues included in Heavenly Discourse for magazines. The earliest ones had appeared in The Masses, which was closed down by the US government during World War One as seditious for opposing America’s entry into the war. The essays attacked religious intolerance, militarism and prudery in a highly humorous fashion and were a Jazz Age sensation. In one dialogue, God asks Gabriel to accuse Satan of atrocities to justify going to war against him.

    • Cabbages and Kings (1904)- O. Henry . This is a collection of linked short stories set in a fictional Central American country. O’Henry invented the term “banana republic” to describe the place.

Later in the year, Penguin published paperback editions of Carson McCuller’s The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, John Steinbeck’s Tortilla Flats and James T. Farrell’s Short Stories. among other titles.

PELICAN TITLES

Penguin launched Pelican Books, its non-fiction line, in the United States in February. Distributors were resistant to the line at first.

The initial titles were:

    • Public Opinion (1922) by Walter Lippmann. This seminal work by the noted journalist and pundit discussed how the media and political elites form public opinion in a world that had grown too complex for most people to grasp. He supported this role for the elite who he believed were capable of rising above the opinions of the masses who were easily manipulated by demagogues.

    • Patterns of Culture (1934) by Ruth Benedict. This highly influential book by a noted Columbia University anthropology professor demonstrated cultural relativism by examining four disparate societies. It was long required reading in Anthropology 101. In 1946, Benedict published another major work, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword , about Japanese culture and society.

    • You and Music (1940) by Christian Darnton. A history of music by a British modernist composer.

    • The Birth and Death of the Sun (1940) by George Gamow. Gamow explained the study of the cosmos to the layman in this book. He was a noted Ukrainian-born physicist and cosmologist who had defected to the United States in 1934. He later became a major proponent and popularizer of the Big Bang theory, He wrote several popular books that presented the latest scientific discoveries and theories to the general public.

    • An Enemy of the People: Anti-Semitism (1945) by James Parkes. The book was described in an April 1946 review in Foreign Affairs as “a concise analysis of the politics of contemporary anti-Semitism and of the social problems it creates.” Parkes was an Anglican clergyman who had been crusading against anti-Semitism since the 1920s, condemning in particular the role that Christianity had played in inciting the persecution of the Jews. He was a fervent opponent of the Nazis. While living in Switzerland, he offered his home as a temporary refuge for Jews fleeing Nazi Germany and in 1935, shortly before returning to England, he escaped an assassination attempt. After the war he played a major role in interfaith efforts and lobbied the British government allow the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine.