When hard times down a Penguin in the context of the Wendy Doniger controversy

[Luis Vas]

When hard times down a Penguin

The announcement of the publisher's merger with Random House came the
same week that Scotland Yard's headquarters and the Admiralty Arch in
London were sold off, a sign of what post-industrial decline has done
to 'Great' Britain

Deep anguish and nostalgia, but ultimately there is a weary sense of
déjà vu: "so, there goes another British cultural icon." No, not the
BBC. Not yet, though with its licence fee frozen and the pressure to
find alternative sources of income mounting nobody is betting on its
future.

For now, the concern is over the loss of Penguin, Allen Lane's
revolutionary paperback invention about which George Orwell said that
they were such "splendid value for six pence...that if other
publishers had any sense they would combine against them and suppress
them." It is not, perhaps, widely known that Penguin has a historic
Indian connection which pre-dates Penguin (India); V.K. Krishna Menon
was the founding editor of its non-fiction imprint, Pelican, launched
way back in 1937.

By this time next year, Penguin would have ceased to be an independent
stand-alone imprint having merged with German-owned Random House as a
junior partner. Under a deal, announced recently, Penguin's current
owners Pearson, who also publish The Financial Times, will have a
minority stake in the merged company "Penguin-Random House" while
Random House's proprietors, Bertelsmann, will control 53 per cent.

The official spin is that the two imprints will "continue to enjoy
independence" and the "freedom to decide which books to publish and
how best to publish them." But even those who understand the business
logic behind the merger are not convinced that Penguin's identity will
be protected.

"Pure guff," is how one prominent critic dismissed the claim even as
he acknowledged the pressure on the publishing industry to
"consolidate" the market for printed books as it struggles to overcome
increasing competition from digital books, notably Amazon which now
sells 114 ebooks for every 100 printed books.

The fears

Fears that Penguin will be "swallowed" by its bigger partner may be
exaggerated, but critics point out that to pretend that nothing will
change and it will be business as usual is to miss the point that the
aim of the merger is to achieve economies of scale by shedding jobs
and "streamlining" (read "cutting down") editorial output. They reckon
that Penguin, as a junior partner in the new company, is bound to lose
its identity -- as invariably happens in an unequal union.

"The myth is when you combine two great companies you get one even
greater company. This will end up a complete takeover of Penguin. It
isn't by chance that every Tesco looks the same," said Andrew Franklin
of Profile Books, a leading British independent publishing house. Big
publishers, he said, claimed to promote diversity and localism but
"that's not how it works."

Writers fear that the merged company, billed as the world's "largest
consumer publisher" with a 25 per cent share of the U.K. and U.S.
markets, will reduce competition and result in a narrow range of books
being published -- besides driving down advances and royalties. There
have been calls for competition authorities to look at the deal
closely, given the size of the merger.

Commentary on Britain

But what will it mean to Penguin readers? After all, this is not the
first time that a popular publisher has been poached. Corporate
mergers and takeovers involving some of the biggest names in
publishing -- Jonathan Cape, Secker & Warburg, Macmillan and, of course
Random House itself, to name just a few -- have been going on for years
with most readers barely noticing the change. So, why the fuss over
Penguin?

"But Penguin is different," according to Ian Jack, former editor of Granta.

"No other imprint in the world has meant so much to its readers -- to
the point where at one time, the penguin colophon was as big a
recommendation as the author's name. It was the 'first serious attempt
to introduce branded goods to the books trade,' wrote Edward Young,
the artist who drew the Penguin from life at London zoo, and it was a
glorious success from the start...Penguin marked their owners out as
progressives as well as cultural self-improvers," Mr. Jack commented
in The Observer.

If a book was ever judged by its cover, then a Penguin cover was a
winner from the moment it rolled off the printing presses. Will it
ever be the same again?

But a more important question raised by Mr. Jack and others is: what
does Penguin's merger with Random House say about Britain?

The move was announced the same week that we were told that Scotland
Yard, Metropolitan Police's historic Central London headquarters, was
to be sold as part of a £500 million savings plan, and another of
London's tourist landmarks -- the 100-year-old Admiralty Arch on the
Mall just yards from Buckingham Palace -- was sold to a Spanish
investor for £60 million to build a luxury hotel. It is a sign of what
the post-industrial decline has done to this once great imperial power
that it is busy selling off some of its most precious assets from
marquee names in car manufacturing and high street banks to retail
stores and premier football clubs. According to the Government's own
Office for National Statistics, 41 per cent of British businesses are
now owned by foreigners and, with no respite from the economic crisis
in sight, more are waiting to be flogged to the highest bidder.

In England, England, Julian Barnes's brilliant farce on Britain's
future, a tourist theme park -- a replica of the "old" country in all
its past glory -- goes on to become a thriving independent country
while real Britain regresses into oblivion. Although Barnes's novel
failed to win the Booker Prize for which it was shortlisted in 1998,
his dystopian view could well yet prove prophetic given Britain's
current trajectory. With its status as a political and economic power
in seemingly terminal decline, a Barnes-style theme park might be a
good idea to preserve the memories of a Britain that didn't need a
£500,000 global campaign to put the "Great" back into "Great Britain."

MADRAS MISCELLANY
Penguin's Madras link
S. MUTHIAH



The other day, when Nandan Nilekani's book Imagining India, was
released before a large and high-powered gathering, I wondered how
many present that evening realised that the imprint which was also
being launched that day, Allen Lane, had a Madras connection.
That connection goes back to 1915 when a young man from Malabar, V.K.
Krishna Menon, came to join his father's alma mater, Presidency
College, to study History and Economics. The young student, however,
was indifferent to his studies and spent more time on the activities
of the College Union, the College's various debating societies, and
the lectures by eminent men for which the Madras of the day was
famous. He crowned his academic recalcitrance with a bit of derring-do
that got him almost expelled -- being saved only by the intercession of
his History Professor, M.A. Candeth. One day, the red and green flag
of Annie Besant's Home Rule League had fluttered from the flagmast of
the South's leading Government institution, and it was traced to that
rebellious student -- and though Candeth had saved his skin, he was as
uncertain as the young man's father as to where the youth was headed.

The father, however, decided the boy was headed for Madras Law
College. There, future lawyers always attended college in what was
considered 'proper' attire, and that included coat and tie and turban
even if you wore a dhoti -- which had to be in panchakacham style. But
that was not for this young man who daily turned up in a rather
scruffy kurta and veshti set.
Whether the Law College faculty frowned on him or not, it did not
particularly worry him. Annie Besant's clarion call for Home Rule was
what stirred him -- and one fine day, he just quit college and landed
on her doorstep, bedroll in hand. Living in a bachelor's den in Adyar,
he taught at Besant's National University, became Arundale's
Secretary, and joined the Indian Boy Scouts' Association Besant had
launched, founding for it the first scout troop in Madras, the
Mohammed Troop, in Komaleeswaranpet.

Three years later, Besant and Arundale sent him to England under a
scheme they had launched to ensure Indian talent was further
developed. In 1924, he arrived in London. He was to spend his next 30
years there.

He joined the London School of Economics, converted the Commonwealth
of India League into the more politically focussed India League,
became a Borough Councillor, qualified as a barrister and practised
half-heartedly. During the course of all this, he also got into
publishing.
In 1932, he became an editor of Bodley Head and got its
Twentieth-Century Library series going. For Selwyn and Blount, he
edited its series called Topical Books. Meanwhile, he dreamt of
flooding the market with cheap paperback editions of quality titles.
He discussed his idea with a colleague at Bodley Head and Allen Lane
jumped at it.

In 1935, they quit Bodley Head and with a £100 capital set up office
in the crypt of St. Pancras' Borough Church. Thus was born Penguin
books. Lane edited the fiction that they would publish as Penguins and
his partner edited the non-fiction to be published as Pelicans. Among
the Pelicans he edited were Bernard Shaw's The Intelligent Woman's
Guide to Socialism, Capitalism, Sovietism, and Fascism and H.G. Wells'
A Short History of the World.
It was a partnership that began to make money from the start. But it
was too good to last. Lane loved publishing but he also saw it as a
business. His partner was too much of an idealist. They argued over
where their business was headed, in a restaurant one day. Lane called
his partner a "bottleneck". V.K. Krishna Menon got up and walked out --
and out of Penguin too. Nehru, who had met Menon in London and forged
a close friendship with him, later made Menon his Minister for
Defence. The war with China in 1962 led to Menon's fall. Allen Lane,
on the other hand, went on to publishing fame and fortune.

Pelican Book Covers
Lane expanded the business in 1937 with the publication of George
Bernard Shaw's The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism and
Capitalism under the Pelican Books imprint, an imprint designed to
educate the reading public rather than entertain. Recognising his own
limitations Lane appointed V. K. Krishna Menon as the first
commissioning edition of the series, supported by an advisory panel
consisting of Peter Chalmers Mitchell, H. L. Bales and W. E. Williams.
Several thousand Pelicans were published over the next half-century
and brought high quality accounts of the current state of knowledge in
many fields, often written by authors of specialised academic
books.[19] (The Pelican series, in decline for several years, was
finally discontinued in 1984.)
Aircraft Recognition (S82) by R. A. Saville-Sneath, was a best seller.
In 1940, the children's imprint Puffin Books began with a series of
non-fiction picture books; the first work of children's fiction
published under the imprint was Barbara Euphan Todd's Worzel Gummidge
the following year. Another series which began in wartime was the
Penguin Poets: the first volume was a selection of Tennyson's poems
(D1) in 1941. Later examples are The Penguin Book of Modern American
Verse (D22), 1954, and The Penguin Book of Restoration Verse (D108),
1968. J. M. Cohen's Comic and Curious Verse appeared in three volumes
over a number of years.
Image source: Flickr user letslookupandsmi