She brought Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh and Dorothy L Sayers to the masses and revolutionised the way we read, yet the life of Eunice Frost, the Penguin editor who devoted herself to the paperback, has been largely forgotten
By Gaby Wood
Published: The Telegraph, 05 Aug 2010
Eunice Frost at a Penguin editorial meeting c1950, with the firm's founder, Allen Lane.
Photo: Penguin Archive, University of Bristol Special Collections
In the bowels of the Arts and Social Sciences Library at Bristol University is a set of 73 archival boxes. Part of the vast archive of Penguin Books, which covers the publishing house's 75-year history, these are the personal papers of one of the industry's most significant, yet forgotten, forces. The archive contains letters from almost every significant writer of the 20th century, so the last person I expected to meet, rising from these miscellaneous documents and asserting her complicated character, was a charismatic and invisible lady of letters.
Eunice Frost became an editor at Penguin in the late 1930s and went on to be its first female director. Along with the firm's founder, Allen Lane, she revolutionised the way we read by making good writing accessible to anyone for the price of a packet of cigarettes. So much was she the guiding spirit of the historic house that its penguin mascot and logo is named 'Frostie' after her. In 1958 she became the first woman in publishing to be awarded an OBE for services to literature.
Yet her name never appeared on any book, and even those who knew her well are still in the dark about the specifics of her life and the causes of her chronic regret. She died alone in 1998 at the age of 82, surrounded by piles of paper 5ft high. All this was scooped up one day by the Penguin archivists and brought to the Bristol basement in a van. Much of it could not be saved, and that which could has barely been looked at since.
The Penguin archive at Bristol began its life in 1960, with Allen Lane's donation of his personal collection of signed early editions. It has expanded to include a copy of every book ever published by Penguin, plus 2,300 boxes of letters, internal memos, original artwork, reviews and the private papers of some of Penguin's staff. In 2008 the Arts and Humanities Research Council gave the university a grant of £650,000 to comb through the Penguin holdings over the course of four years and to produce an online catalogue.
The full story at The Telegraph.
Footnote:
As a former Penguin staffer I found this story absolutely fascinating as will many others I am sure.
Can someone identify the other two in the photo above?
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