John Lane Company:

An Inventory of Its Records at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center [Part 1]

Organizational History

The future publisher of The Yellow Book and other works that typify Nineties literary decadence was born into a Devon farming family on March 14, 1854. In his mid teens John Lane migrated to London and soon found employment as a clerk in the Railway Clearing House. An ambitious and energetic autodidact, Lane had by the mid 1880s gained the knowledge, interest, and capital to consider entering the London book trade. A chance association with Elkin Mathews quickly led the pair into a partnership, culminating in the creation in 1887 of the Bodley Head, a firm initially involved in the antiquarian book trade.

Within a few years the Bodley Head had begun publishing limited editions to appeal to a sophisticated market, attracting such authors and illustrators as Oscar Wilde, Richard Le Gallienne, Aubrey Beardsley, and Charles Ricketts. Elkin Mathews was increasingly unhappy with the direction the firm was taking, and in 1894 the partnership was terminated. Lane retained the firm's imprint and to it prefixed his own name: John Lane the Bodley Head. In 1896 he opened a New York branch.

In the same year as Mathews' departure Lane launched the audacious Yellow Book, with Henry Harland as editor. The flamboyant periodical quickly became the talk of literary London, but the uproar produced by Oscar Wilde's legal difficulties and public reaction against the artistically esoteric hastened the end of The Yellow Book in 1897. Lane's 1898 marriage to a wealthy American author, Anna Eichberg King, perhaps abetted his own increasingly conservative commercial and artistic instincts, and after the Yellow Book debacle he pursued a more conventional course.

In the early years of the twentieth century John Lane broadened the scope of his publishing activities, issuing a considerable range of nonfiction and, most notably, prose fiction. An array of fashionable authors including Arnold Bennett, G. K. Chesterton, Agatha Christie, Ford Madox Ford, C. S. Forester, Kenneth Grahame, Stephen Leacock, W. J. Locke, Alice Meynell, J. B. Priestley, Saki, and H. G. Wells were closely associated with the Bodley Head imprint into the 1920s.

Lane's personal interest in visual art found an outlet in The Speakers of the House of Commons from the Earliest Times to the Present Day (1911). The principal text was by Arthur I. Dasent, but the notes on the portraits of the speakers were by Lane himself.

Following World War One the Bodley Head became a limited liability company as Hubert Carr-Gomme and Ronald Boswell joined the firm, along with Allen Lane, a young cousin of John. At the time of John Lane's death on February 2, 1925, the firm was in decline, culminating in its bankruptcy in 1936. At that point a consortium of publishers acquired the firm's name and assets, while Allen Lane, having recently founded Penguin Books, went on to a successful career in that venture.

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Scope and Contents

The records of the John Lane Company, 1856-1933, comprise correspondence, readers' reports, manuscripts and proof copies, financial records, notes, documents, and autobiographical materials. The material is in part in its original order, but in general the current organization is an imposed one.

Business Records, the first series, represents over four-fifths of the entire collection, and the largest portion of this is incoming correspondence. Major groups of correspondence are included from A. M. Broadley, Lady Randolph Churchill, Walter Crane, Stephen Leacock, Richard Le Gallienne, Stephen Phillips, and William Watson. Many other significant figures, including Gertrude Atherton, Arnold Bennett, and Ezra Pound, are represented by smaller groups of correspondence.

While it is evident certain figures associated with the firm (Agatha Christie, C. S. Forester, and Oscar Wilde in particular) are not present, and while there is evidence certain time periods are better represented than others, the correspondence is nevertheless a significant window into the firm's relations with its authors and fellow publishers. The arrangement of this correspondence is a locally-applied one, as it was evident that the material was no longer in its original order.

Scattered throughout the business correspondence is a significant amount of John Lane's personal correspondence. Included here are letters from social contacts of a relatively late date (the Prideaux-Brune family, for example), as well as family and friends from his younger days. Also present is correspondence related to his personal interests (antiques, collectibles, and art, among others, and the book he co-authored with Arthur Dasent). A small quantity of other business records, largely financial and miscellaneous, are found in the series.

Series II, Creative Work, comprises just over ten document boxes of readers' reports for the years 1894 to 1930, along with a small number of manuscripts and galleys. While the readers' reports are not present for all years (there are none for the years 1909 to 1914, nor for 1917-1920), they are in their original order for the years represented in the Center's holdings. A dozen or so manuscripts and marked proof copies are present in the series, including two by Lascelles Abercromie and several by William Watson.

The John Lane Personal Materials series is small and mixed in content, but does include some autobiographical notes, along with rough notes for projected works on British art in India and other art topics John Lane considered of interest. As noted above, Lane's personal correspondence present in the collection is filed in Series I.

Original art work, including prints, drawings, watercolors, and sketches by Vernon Hill, as well as designs for bindings and title-pages for books published by Lane were withdrawn from the John Lane Company records and transferred the the Ransom Center's Art Collection. Additional material withdrawn from the Lane records and housed in the Center's Vertical File Collection includes unbound gatherings of illustrated books, photographs of art works, and newspaper clippings.

Other John Lane Company records are to be found at the University of Reading.

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Restrictions

Access:

Open for research

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Administrative Information

URL:

www.lib.utexas.edu/hrc/fa/johnlane.html

Acquisition:

Purchases, 1986-1998 (R10976, R12321, R14286)

Processed by:

Bob Taylor, 2000

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Other Finding Aid

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Bibliography:

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John Lane Company Records--Folder List

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