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Hutchinson’s Wild West Pocket Library
This feels almost like a postscript to my previous post on Hutchinson’s Crime Book Society, and maybe in the end that’s what the series was to Hutchinson. But it must have started off with much more optimism.
Hutchinson launched the Crime Book Society in June 1936 and the Wild West Pocket Library followed in October of the same year. Four books were published simultaneously to launch the series, but I can only assume that they sold badly, as no more books were added for almost two years after that. Whether it was the choice of titles or authors, or some failure of marketing, I can’t tell, but they were clearly not a success.
Perhaps it was just that Collins had launched its Wild West Club series only two months earlier and there was not enough of a market to support two apparently very similar series. Perhaps Collins had the better authors, or the better stories. Even their series was relatively slow to get going in comparison to the crime series, although it did in the end last a long time.
Whatever the reason, there was no follow up from Hutchinson to the first four titles until July 1938, when two more were published and even then the format was rather different, so that they hardly look like the same series.
The first four books had an image of a group of cowboys on horseback stretched diagonally across the front cover and came in at least two different colours, green and red. The dustwrappers were largely identical to the covers, except that the price of 6d is shown only on the dustwrappers. By the time the later two books were published in 1938, green had been generally accepted in the market as the colour for crime and yellow as the colour for westerns, so both books are in yellow and have a revised cover design with a smaller line of cowboys in silhouette and the title in a white circle. It looks to me like a bit of a mess of a design and certainly not as striking as the design of the earlier books.
The books were presumably no more successful than the first four had been as they were the last books to be added to the series. Only six books ever appeared.
By 1940 though they must have been willing to try again, as through the Leisure Library, a different part of the Hutchinson group, they launched another very similar attempt, this time branded the ‘Wild West Library’. This series did at least make it as far as twelve titles, although in the end it too was relatively short lived.
Leisure wares
Large publishing groups like HarperCollins, Penguin Random House or Hachette today use lots of different imprints for the books they publish. I’m not very sure why, because most readers would have little idea of the publisher’s name even after reading a book, never mind before buying it.
It wasn’t always so. Paperback series used to cultivate brand loyalty and the brand was very clearly signalled on the covers. If you bought a Penguin Book in the 1930s, 1940s or even later, you certainly knew it was a Penguin, both before you bought it and after you had read it. And given Penguin’s success, almost all other paperback publishers adopted clear and prominent brand identities as well. Which left Hutchinson, the HarperCollins of its day, with a problem. The Hutchinson Group contained a long list of publishing companies and it’s not clear to me how much cooperation there was between them. So they ended up with not one paperback series competing with Penguin, but several.
The Hutchinson Pocket Library was perhaps their flagship series in response to Penguin, but from different parts of the group also came Jarrolds Jackdaw books, Toucan books, John Long Four Square Thrillers and the Hutchinson Popular Pocket Library.
For several years in the late 1930s, the Leisure Library Company, another part of Hutchinson, resisted the trend to Penguinisation. They continued to publish paperbacks that were a throwback to pre-Penguin days – larger format, brightly illustrated covers, and selling for just 3d or 4d, substantially undercutting Penguin on price, but unashamedly down-market. Although Penguin mythology lauds the company for selling books at the low price of 6d, in reality Penguins were more at the top end of the paperback price range and only just below the 7d price of cheap hardbacks at the time.
But in 1940 the Leisure Library capitulated and joined the rush to establish Penguin-style paperback series, adding another to Hutchinson’s long list. Although in this case, it might be more accurate to describe them as Collins White Circle style.
Like Collins, the Leisure Library started separate sub-series for crime, westerns and romantic novels. Each sub-series had its own colour, with both companies using green for crime and yellow for westerns, and each added a stylised picture as part of the cover design.
To some extent also like Collins, the connection between the sub-series was not particularly emphasised, and the books were primarily branded as coming from ‘The Wild West Library’, ‘Crime Novel Library’ or ‘Romantic Novel Library’. The crime and romance novels are still shown as published by the Leisure Library Co. on the title page and the spine, but the westerns refer only to the Wild West Library. The westerns are though clearly linked to the crime novels by the square white title panel with perforated edges. These two series could almost have been called the Hutchinson White Square books, but oddly the Romance sub-series went for a white circle instead, making it easily confused with the Collins series.
The series was not very long-lived, although that was probably as much to do with the effect of the war on publishing, as with the commercial success or failure of the books. They were all published in 1940, in a relatively short period between about May and July, and few paperback series were able to maintain much of a publishing programme after that until the end of the war. There were a total of 32 books – fourteen crime, twelve westerns and six romances. I don’t think any of them have achieved much of a mark on literary history, even amongst fans of the relevant genres, but they added another layer to the story of the paperback revolution unleashed by Penguin.
A most English writer
The recent news of the death of Charles Aznavour reminded me, like many others, that this most French of singers, was born as Shahnour Vaghinag Aznavourian, the son of Armenian immigrants. To the British at least, he had an impeccably French accent, sang quintessentially French songs about French passions and in an unmistakably French way.
Which reminds me in turn of Michael Arlen, that most English of early twentieth century writers, who was though born as Dikran Kouyoumdjian, the son of Armenian immigrants to Britain. He himself was born in Bulgaria, but came to England with his parents in 1901 at the age of 5. He was sent to Malvern College, which no doubt turned him into the perfect English gentleman, as it no doubt still does for his modern equivalents. He remained a Bulgarian citizen though throughout the First World War (in which Bulgaria was aligned with Germany, Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire) becoming a British Citizen only in 1922 and changing his name at this point to Michael Arlen.
My interest in him is focused on the books he had published in Continental Europe by Tauchnitz and Albatross and in the UK by Penguin and Hutchinson. He first appeared as a Tauchnitz author in 1930, one of the new authors introduced by Max Christian Wegner, who had been appointed as General Manager of the company in 1929. The first of his books to appear was ‘Lily Christine’ as volume 4926. As usual Tauchnitz preferred to start by publishing his latest work, rather than going back to the earlier works that had made his name.
‘Lily Christine’, a tangled romance chronicling the lives of upper class society in the 1920s ‘Jazz Age’, had been published in the UK in 1928. It is probably fairly typical of the novels that led to Arlen being described as the English F. Scott Fitzgerald. The first printing in Tauchnitz is dated March 1930 at the top of the rear wrapper, and like all first printings from this era, has a two column list of latest volumes on the back and inside wrappers. Later printings have a single column listing on the back only.
It was followed shortly after by ‘Babes in the Wood’, a collection of short stories that begins with an apparently autobiographical story called ‘Confessions of a naturalised Englishman’ (although a note adds that all characters are fictitious, including the author). It appeared as volume 4943 and the first printing is dated June 1930 at the top of the rear wrapper. In the three months between publication of the two books, Tauchnitz had introduced a modernised design for the front wrappers, so that they look rather different at first.
A final Tauchnitz volume, ‘Men dislike women’ appeared the following year, as volume 5001, dated July 1931 on the rear wrapper. By this time Christian Wegner had been fired by Tauchnitz and was shortly to re-appear as one of the founders of the rival Albatross series. Albatross was hugely successful in persuading leading British and American authors to publish with them rather than Tauchnitz, and Arlen quickly switched allegiance to the new firm, no doubt partly because of his earlier relationship with Wegner.
‘Young men in love’, an earlier novel by Arlen, first published in 1927, appeared as volume 40 of the Albatross series in late 1932, in the blue covers used to identify love stories. Then in 1934, ‘Man’s mortality’, a rather different type of novel from his usual romances, was published as volume 211. This is more like science fiction, set 50 years in the future and often compared (almost always unfavourably) with Huxley’s ‘Brave New World’, published the previous year. Albatross gave it the yellow covers representing ‘psychological novels, essays etc.’, although perhaps slightly oddly ‘Brave New World’ had been given the orange covers of ‘tales and short stories, humorous and satirical works’.
Arlen’s third and final book in Albatross, was a book of short stories though, and so was given orange covers, making him one of only a handful of writers to have books published in Albatross in three different categories / colours (Evelyn Waugh, Aldous Huxley and Katherine Mansfield were others, and D.H. Lawrence managed four). ‘The Crooked Coronet’ was published in March 1938 as volume 362.
This was long after Albatross had taken over editorial control of Tauchnitz in 1934, with the two series being managed jointly from then on. Arlen could presumably have been published in either series, and the criteria for determining which series was used, are not entirely clear. Most authors stayed with the series they were published in before the two came together, generally with more of the edgier modern authors in Albatross and more of the longer established or more conservative authors in Tauchnitz. That fitted the harsh reality that authors banned by the Nazis could not be published by the German-based Tauchnitz. I don’t think that Michael Arlen was ever banned (or could ever be described as edgy and modern), so presumably he stayed in Albatross just because that was where he was at the time of the coming together.
Meanwhile in the UK, Penguin had been launched in 1935 and was buying up paperback rights where it could, mostly for books published several years earlier, rather than the latest novels. They obtained the rights to Michael Arlen’s ‘These charming people’, another collection of short stories that had been first published by Collins in 1923, and this appeared as volume 86 of the Penguin series in 1937. It includes a story called ‘When the nightingale sang in Berkeley Square’, a title that was later appropriated for a song that became one of the most popular songs of the second world war.
I think ‘These charming people’ was the only one of Michael Arlen’s works to appear in Penguin, but at least two others appeared in Hutchinson’s Pocket Library. Hutchinson was the original UK publisher for several of Arlen’s books, so they were in a stronger position to publish paperback editions in their series competing against Penguin. ‘Young men in love’ appeared as volume 50 of the series in May 1938 and ‘Lily Christine as volume 59 in October of the same year.
There may have been other paperback editions in other series, but by this time Arlen’s style was going out of fashion. He wrote mainly about an era and a society that had vanished, at least from public sympathy, with the depression of the 1930s and that was totally out of tune with the conditions of the second world war. For a few short years though he had been one of the most popular writers in Britain. His most successful novel, ‘The green hat’, first published in 1924, doesn’t seem to have ever appeared in paperback.
Arlen himself had left Britain in 1927, first joining D.H. Lawrence in Florence and then moving to Cannes, where he married a Greek Countess, Atalanta Mercati. He returned to Britain during the war, but then moved to the US for the last years of his life. His son, Michael J. Arlen, an American with Armenian / British / Greek / French / Bulgarian heritage, has written ‘Exiles’, a memoir of his parents and his childhood, itself published many years later in Penguin.
Jarrold and the Jackdaws
It’s usually only people from Norwich who recognise the name Jarrold. In that area it’s well known as the name of a big department store, and was for a time the name of a stand at Norwich City’s football ground. The Jarrold Group that run the store was also for many years involved both in printing and in publishing. The John Jarrold Printing Museum in Norwich is a lasting reminder of their connection with printing.
The name is less well remembered in publishing, but it has a history stretching back almost 200 years. According to the history on the company’s website, John Jarrold had established a printing press in 1815 and was moving into publishing by 1823. Jarrold & Sons, as the business became known, was never a major publisher, but it had some striking successes, notably publishing the first edition of ‘Black Beauty’ in 1877.
The first printing of ‘Black Beauty’, published by Jarrold and Sons
After that the company history becomes a bit vague about what happened to the publishing business. Wikipedia says Jarrold Publishing was sold to Sutton Publishing in 2007, but the story must be more complicated than this. It seems clear that at least by the end of the 1930s, the publisher Jarrold & Sons was part of the Hutchinson Group, the group of companies put together by Walter Hutchinson. The group included John Long, Hurst & Blackett, Stanley Paul, Rich & Cowan, Skeffington and others, as well as Jarrold and Hutchinson itself. I’m not clear how separate all these companies were. Each continued to publish books under its own imprint, but particularly in paperback, the books increasingly resembled each other, and sometimes books from different publishers appeared in the same series.
By October 1936, when Jarrold launched a new paperback series, the Jarrolds’ ‘Jackdaw’ Library, the whole paperback publishing industry in Britain was in turmoil. Penguin’s launch a year earlier had completely changed the basis of competition in the industry. Illustrated covers suddenly looked either old-fashioned or down-market or possibly both.
The Hutchinson Group had already reacted by launching a new Penguin-style series, the Hutchinson Pocket Library, just three months after Penguin. Alongside this, it had started the companion ‘Crime Book Society’ series, and also a more down-market series of mostly romances, the Hutchinson Popular Pocket Library.
So quite why it needed another paperback series competing in the same market, is far from obvious. Perhaps Jarrold was at this point operating independently from the Hutchinson Group? Perhaps there was some perceived distinction between the type of stories in the Hutchinson Pocket Library and the sort published by Jarrold? In retrospect it seems surprising that they didn’t just combine the series, but at the time they no doubt had their reasons.
They were far from the only company to choose another bird’s name for a series competing with Penguin, and the choice of Jackdaw probably owed something to alliteration. In most other respects they followed the Penguin model directly – same size, same price, same standard designed cover with a strong series branding, same variety of bold colours, same use of dustwrappers in the same design as the covers.
In some of the details though they were a bit quirkier. Their title panel, a white circle on the cover, was copied directly from Collins rather than Penguin, and the choice of colours on the books seems initially to be fairly random, rather than representing genre. Later on they came into line with almost everybody else by mostly allocating green covers to crime books. Another quirk was the picture of the jackdaw, which varied slightly from book to book. There were at least five different drawings, all perched on a post and creating much the same visual impact, but adopting different positions.
The type of book published was very similar to Penguin. One of Jarrold’s leading authors at the time was Ethel Mannin, and they had already sold paperback rights for two of her novels to Penguin before starting their own series. Now another five appeared in the Jackdaw Library, alongside three others by Margery Allingham, later acquired by Penguin. The highlight of the short series though was Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s ‘Scots Quair’ trilogy. All three volumes appeared in the series, although slightly oddly, not in the ‘right’ order. Also included was ‘Spartacus’ written under the same author’s real name, as J. Leslie Mitchell.
The first eight Jackdaw books appeared together in October 1936 and were followed by another eight in the first three months of 1937, bringing the series up to volume 16. Volumes 17 to 20 were published in June 1937 before they seemed to run out of steam. Perhaps they weren’t selling well, or perhaps it was just that as a small publisher they didn’t have enough titles to maintain such a fast pace.
A further two titles appeared a year later in June 1938, both crime titles, and after another year’s gap the series re-launched as the Jackdaw Crime Series, with the numbering starting again from one. Presumably the crime titles were selling better than the general fiction.
An early Jackdaw Crime Series title and a later one, unusually in yellow
But by this time war was on the horizon. Eight Jackdaw Crime Series titles were published in 1939 and another eight by about the end of 1940. But the books became thinner and lost their dustwrappers as wartime conditions and paper rationing started to bite. The numbered series ended at volume 16, with a few more unnumbered books appearing later, with the price increased to ninepence.
A wartime unnumbered title at ninepence
The Hutchinson Services Editions later included a small number of Jarrolds Jackdaw titles and there were even a few more Jackdaws published after the war, but that’s another story. As a branded series of paperbacks, the Jarrolds Jackdaw Library really lasted only about four years, between 1936 and 1940. I don’t imagine many people collect them today, or even remember them. They were though an important part of the great flourishing of paperback series that occurred between the launch of Penguin and the Second World War.
Order from chaos – The Hutchinson Services Editions
The two longest series of UK Services Editions, from Guild Books and from Collins, between them account for almost 400 of the 500 or so books that exist in total, at least in paperback. In comparison with those two, Hutchinson were a minnow. But they still produced a series of over 30 Services Editions as well as offering a million other books to the forces as a free Victory Gift.
The standard cover design for Hutchinson Services Editions
Although the Hutchinson Services Editions appear to be a consistently branded series, this hides the complexity of the underlying businesses. Having been mainly a publisher of magazines, Walter Hutchinson, son of the original founder, had switched the direction of the firm into books and by the start of the Second World War seems to have built it up into quite a mini-conglomerate of publishing businesses. It included amongst others, Hurst & Blackett, Jarrolds, John Long, Stanley Paul, Rich & Cowan, Skeffington and Andrew Melrose. It also operated through a bewildering variety of paperback imprints including Toucan Books, Jarrolds Jackdaw Library, The Crime Book Society, The Leisure Library, Readers’ Library, Four Square Books and so on, as well as several different series using the Hutchinson brand more directly. What the marketing logic was behind such a variety of different brands and series, is completely beyond me, but at least for the Services Editions they left most of that behind and brought order from the chaos.
Not entirely, because the books still carry different series names on the front cover and different publishers’ names on the title page. For instance ‘Rapid Fire’ by Joan Butler is headed ‘The Toucan novels’ on the cover, and is published by Stanley Paul & Co. Ltd. But at least the cover design is standard, the books clearly form a single series and they are listed together in the advertising pages within the books.
Those lists within the books also mean that for once we do more or less know what exists in this series. There are 33 books in the series, including 15 from the Hutchinson’s Pocket Library, 7 from Jarrolds Jackdaw, 7 from Toucan Books, 2 from John Long Four Square and 2 from Skeffington’s Pocket Library. They’re produced to War Economy standard, so very poor quality paper and production, but a surprising number seem to have survived and some of these books are less rare than other Services Editions. This may be because they come from Iater in the war, possibly around 1945, although the books are undated. I don’t know how many were printed, but comparison with other non-Services Editions suggests it may have been 25,000 copies of each book. For instance the Services Edition of ‘In Brighton Waters’ by Gordon Volk says ’52nd thousand’ on the title page, while the Free Victory Gift edition of the same book says ’27th thousand’.
As well as the paperback editions, several of the books are also found in a simple red hardback format. This was probably produced by the publishers, although it could have been added later by the Services Central Book Depot, or some other agency.
The hardback version of a Hutchinson Services Edition
I’ll look at the Free Victory Gift series in a separate post. The sting in the tail from Hutchinson though, is that I have a single copy of a Crime Book Society Services Edition, which comes from the Hutchinson Group, but is not in the standard format or included in any of the standard lists of books. Was this a one-off, or are there others out there waiting to be discovered?
A tale of two Pocket Libraries
I’ve talked before about how Penguin transformed the market for paperback books in the UK in 1935, particularly by using non-illustrated covers, and how other companies reacted to this. Recent posts have looked at how Collins in particular reacted with the launch of their White Circle series.
But the fastest company to react seems to have been Hutchinson. The first Penguins appeared in July 1935 and by October of the same year, they had competition in the form of Hutchinson’s Pocket Library, clearly copying some of the principal design features of Penguins – the same size, covers in similarly bright colours, dustwrappers in the same design as the books, and of course the same sixpenny price. Perhaps most important though, is the lack of any illustration on the cover. Hutchinson were an established paperback publisher, but their pre-Penguin paperbacks had illustrated covers. Within three months of Penguin’s launch, here they are launching a new series without illustrations.
It seems to have been reasonably successful, running to around 75 titles before the outbreak of war and ran alongside various other series in different genres – the Hutchinson Crime Book Society published a similar number of books, competing with the Collins White Circle Crime Club as well as the Penguin crime novels, and a Hutchinson non-fiction series competed with Pelican. Pelican having launched in 1937 with a two volume book by Bernard Shaw, the Hutchinson non-fiction series launched in 1938 with a two volume book by H.G. Wells. All of these series had covers in a standard non-illustrated design, following the fashion set by Penguin.
But there was also one other series – the Hutchinson’s Popular Pocket Library, a series of romantic novels. The insertion of that one word ‘popular’ distinguished it from the more serious Hutchinson’s Pocket Library, but the real distinguishing factor was that this series had illustrated covers. This comparison, more than anything, showed the effect that Penguin had had on the market. Illustrated covers now implied a lack of seriousness, or pure escapism. Novels with any literary pretensions at all, even crime novels, or in the case of Collins, westerns, had to have non-illustrated covers. But books that were happy to flaunt their lack of any pretensions, could use illustrations. The word ‘popular’ is being used here almost as a taunt – “we know this is escapist rubbish, but we don’t care – look, cover art!”.
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