The Penguin Archive Project has revealed some fascinating details in the history of Penguin Books, such as the story of their ‘secret editor’ as reported in the Telegraph.
Eunice Frost became an editor at Penguin in the late 1930s and went on to be its first female director. Along with the firm’s founder, Allen Lane, she revolutionised the way we read by making good writing accessible to anyone for the price of a packet of cigarettes. So much was she the guiding spirit of the historic house that its penguin mascot and logo is named ‘Frostie’ after her. In 1958 she became the first woman in publishing to be awarded an OBE for services to literature.
Yet her name never appeared on any book, and even those who knew her well are still in the dark about the specifics of her life and the causes of her chronic regret.
Beyond ‘secret’ editing she also generated original writings, poetry and paintings. A somewhat sarcastic view of identity is presented in her work:
If only I could get a small advance
You bet I’d go straight to the South of France —
You need a lot more for the USA
Than any publisher will give away.
Oh to be Shaw — or even Graham Greene
They are twice damned and still show on the screen.
I hear the Council’s puffed you in Peru,
That’s nothing to my puffing up of YOU,
And anyway the whole thing’s just a plot
To make us think we’re someone when we’re not.
She clearly struggled with how to judge quality when reflecting upon market demand. Penguin appears to have been founded upon the concept that valuable information still can be delivered in affordable packages — quantity should not have to require a lack of quality — so the job of an editor there was particularly important.
In 1935 Allen Lane, then a director of his family’s publishing firm, The Bodley Head, was returning from a visit to see Agatha Christie in Devon when he decided to buy something to read. Scanning the shelves of the shop at Exeter railway station, he found nothing but pulp fiction and reprints of Victorian novels. At that point paperbacks were synonymous with those genres; high-quality fiction came in hardback form.
Lane determined to produce the same fare with soft covers (for sixpence a volume), and to make it available in stations and chain stores, thereby creating a democracy of reading from which civilisation has never looked back
This view of Penguin’s history reminds me of a poetry magazine that was started in 1909 in London. Harold Monro of the Poetry Bookshop in London was the Poetry Review’s founder and first editor.
Published by the Society and sharing its aim of “helping poets and poetry thrive in Britain today” — a declaration of intent towards all schools and groups of poetry, not merely the fashionable or metropolitan…
Although a respected editor at the time his work is far less known than those who followed his vision (e.g. Harriet Monroe of Chicago) and is probably forgotten by most. This new review of Penguin Books history might bring the story of quiet yet influential editors back into focus. Penguin started 20 years later but like the Poetry Review they relied on someone special to find message integrity among authors that could innovate independently from market demand and influence.
