Nicolas Barker

I must first declare an interest, now almost subliminal, in the subject of this vast, comprehensive, polymorphous and wholly captivating book. I was six when the war broke out and 12 when it ended. I read a lot of the books described new, as well as many more that were older. I remember the Magnet, best of comics, closed when the Amalgamated Press ran short of paper; we had to make do with the Dandy and Beano, published by D. C. Thomson of Dundee. George Orwell was less sorry. In ‘Boys’ Weeklies’, published in Horizon in March 1940, he asserted that comics preserved the ruling class attitudes of 1910. ‘The stories in the Magnet are signed “Frank Richards”, but a series lasting 30 years could hardly be the work of the same person every week.

In 1958, half way through the century here recorded, the late and much lamented National Book League put on the first ever antiquarian book fair, with 24 members of the Antiquarian Booksellers’ Association exhibiting. ‘We hope,’ wrote The Book Collector, ‘that the ABA will be encouraged to make this an annual event.’ It did, and in the process transformed the way old books were bought and sold (a fact unnoticed here). It became the custom for some celebrity (or what passed for one) formally to open the fair. One year it fell to my turn. I had noticed that all previous openers had always said, sententiously, how much they owed to the booksellers they knew.

Penguin By Designby Phil BainesPenguin/Allen Lane, £16.99, pp. 255, ISBN 0713998393 Publishers do not make popular heroes. Who has heard of Humph- rey Moseley, who published the Caroline poets? Or Jacob Tonson, apart from Pope’s patronising verses? Thomas Hughes made Tom Brown’s School Days famous, but could not do the same for Daniel Macmillan. But if there is an exception to the rule, it must be Allen Lane, founder of Penguin Books in 1935. The date, the format and the name have all become famous enough to put Lane in the national pantheon. But few know more than that, so a full-length biography is welcome.

Henry VIII is the first English monarch whose features everyone knows. The sharp little eyes in the massive head, the golden beard, above all the commanding stance in which Holbein painted him, are infinitely familiar and always terrifying. This is the man who sent More and Cromwell, two of his wives and many others to the scaffold, who dissolved the monasteries and proclaimed himself head of a new English church. He was also the man who built up the navy and created the new, rich, confident Britain with imperial ambitions, but that is not so obvious in the portraits. Nor is his intellect, although it was that which distinguished him from most of his subjects and other contemporaries.