Alistair McCleery

Penguin and post-colonial publishing 1948-1972.

This article examines the trading structures within which UK publishers operated in the markets of Empire and Commonwealth and, in doing so, concentrates on the development there of Penguin Books. It proposes a model of this development mapped onto a movement from the colonial to the postcolonial to the globalized. A discussion of the Traditional Market Agreement 1947–1975 presents this as a significant factor in the postcolonial phase while the Penguin Africa Library acts as a case study of the specific operations of Penguin during this phase. The article concludes with an account of the transition of Penguin from independence to take-over by Pearson Longman.

Scottish Archive of Print and Publishing History Records

‘Its important that we remember the past is not just dry facts and statistics but also the detailed lives of real people. SAPPHIRE aims to give a voice to these lives.’

Minding Their Own Business: Penguin in Southern Africa

The title of this essay is taken from the 1975 Penguin African Library revised edition of Antony Martin’s ‘Minding Their Own Business: Zambia’s Struggle against Western Control’. This article exploits archival evidence to highlight Penguin’s distinctive attitudes to and practices within the southern African market, particularly, but not exclusively, the major market of South Africa. The Penguin African Library itself contained not only many volumes on South Africa, but also pioneering works on Portuguese decolonisation, the Rhodesian question, and on South-West Africa. This article adopts the framework of a three-phase development in the motivation behind publishing for Africa: tutelage, radicalism and marketisation. The first of these phases is represented by the Penguin (Pelican) West African (later simply African) Series; while the later Penguin African Library illustrates the radicalism of what was then the editorial standpoint. These African Library mass-market paperbacks had a double intent: to inform western readers about a region which, from the early 1960s, dominated international headlines, and to reflect back to increasing numbers of self-aware and educated Africans aspects of the region hidden from them or about which they wished to know more. The degree of opposition to and compromise with colonial and apartheid regimes forms the subject of discussion, as do the reactions in the UK to continuing operations in the region, particularly after the expulsion of South Africa from the Commonwealth in 1961, the adoption of UN Resolution 1761 in 1962, and the growth of the Anti-Apartheid Movement during the 1960s and 1970s. Penguin faced not just the commercial challenge of possibly losing an important export market but also the ethical dilemma posed by a belief in the transformational power of knowledge through the availability of good books at reasonable prices. The article concludes with a discussion of the resolution of that challenge and dilemma subsequent to the takeover of Penguin by Longmans in 1970, and the onset of the final phase of marketisation.

In a class of their own: the autodidact impulse and working class readers in twentieth-century Scotland.

The twentieth century is commonly perceived as the era when the lofty pursuit of ‘learning for learning’s sake’ began declining as an aspiration amongst British working classes. It is a perception strongly informing, for example, one of the most recent and influential studies on the subject, Jonathan Rose’s The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes.1 From the perspective of histories of readership, this certainly amounts to a bleak indictment of working-class ambitions and the place of educational self-improvement in contemporary society. Such assumptions are particularly problematic in the context of Scotland, given this country’s predominant working-class identity and reputation for high levels of literacy.2 An assault on the reputation of Scots certainly raises questions about areas of national identity that inform the writing of Scottish history, and regularly surface in the popular image of the Scot at home and abroad.3 More lately too, elaborations on what constitutes a newly robust Scottish national identity have invoked aspects of Scotland’s historical traditions of intellectualism, and called attention to the supposed widespread respect for learning found at all levels of Scottish society. In the run up to the establishment of a devolved Scottish Parliament, for example, such rhetoric underpinned a political discussion that envisaged a reinvigoration of the Scottish national identity separate from, and not in thrall to, concepts of Britishness.