Word: penguins
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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...
...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...
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...
British Publisher Allen Lane, whose sixpenny paperbound Penguin and Pelican have flooded British newsstands and brought him a fortune, left London for India, Burma and Siam. Purpose: to investigate the possibilities of publishing paper-covered books in Basic English (850 words which "do all the work of 20,000") for use East of Suez...
...candid cameraddict, Douglas Leigh used to tramp along Broadway taking pictures of possible sign locations. Then he would concoct novel advertising schemes, take his propositions to prospective clients. Soon his company, Douglas Leigh, Inc., became famous for such dis plays as its Kool cigarets penguin who winked 3,000 times an hour, its A. & P. coffeepot that emitted actual steam, and its Ballantine's Beer & Ale clown who pitched quoits. In five years the company has erected $1,000,000 worth of electric signs around Times Square, its assets have ballooned to $500,000, and its 28-year...