'Which words to print with the ink?'

James Allingham at his desk

He worked out the cost of the printing, the office and the distribution and soon became fascinated. He saw the venture in its clearest and most material light. To him it appeared as a method of selling low-grade bulk paper at forty times its value with the added advantage that the more of it one sold, the higher the profit became. He saw too that it was the ink on the paper that did the selling, so, the only real problem was which words to print with the ink. (Dance of the Years 1943)

Margery &Herbert

Margery Allingham was looking back, fictionally, to her grandfather’s decision to found a penny paper, The Christian Globe, 150 years ago. James Allingham had been apprenticed as a compositor. When his father died, he seized his opportunity to invest his legacy share in a slim weekly newspaper. Literacy was beginning to boom in the 1870s as the educational initiatives following the 1867 Electoral Reform Act began leavening the number of readers within the population.

Taxes on advertising, on newspapers and on paper itself had been repealed between 1853-1861 and the population was growing. More people were living in cities, available leisure and average income levels increased. As well as more readers, the second stage of the Industrial Revolution brought faster printing and typesetting machines; paper made from wood pulp was significantly less expensive and more abundant than paper made from rags. The c19th railway revolution transformed distribution networks. This was the beginning of the Great Age of Print.

James Allingham, living in south London but with printworks in the Farrington Road was well-placed to profit from a publishing boom but the question remained ‘Which words to print with the ink?’ He chose religion. Popular preachers attracted large crowds; sales of tracts, hymn books and cheap papers then helped keep the enthusiasm flowing. This was a respectable way of reaching out to the vast working and lower middle class. It was also commercial. Of the four printed pages that made James Allingham’s registration issue of The Christian Glowworm (soon The Christian Globe) advertisements filled an entire page – most of them for patent medicines. Patent medicine advertisements always went well in religious papers. They felt more trustworthy.

Advertisers demand proof of readers. The paper’s circulation figures mattered, and it wasn’t too long before Allingham realised that brought and kept readers was feelgood entertainment at least as much as spiritual improvement. Serial fiction and heartwarming short stories were added to The Christian Globe mix, together with portraits of popular preachers and titbits of news. James’s son Herbert wrote many of the paper’s leading articles, as well as some of its fiction and advertising copy.  This family venture lasted 40 years

Well before the end of the c19th, however, far more successful print entrepreneurs – George Newnes, Arthur Pearson, Alfred and Harold Harmsworth, John Leng (Scotland) – had succeeded in capturing the mass market. They didn’t want to improve their readers, merely to entertain and earn from them. Ha’pennies were as acceptable as pennies if they more than doubled the numbers of purchasers. The growth of the late 19^th and early c20th publishing empires is a textbook study in capitalism. Proprietors began to buy up the trees and the ink as well as the machinery and distribution networks. Factory style production enabled identically formatted fiction magazines to fly off the presses with the quantity and speed of newspapers.

ChatGPT hadn’t been invented. The publishers still needed humans to write the words to print with the ink. Words - those magical catalysts that transformed bulk-bought paper from a commodity to a product, then made the inexplicable transference from the page into readers’ hearts and minds. Herbert Allingham, Margery’s father, was one of the many prolific fiction writers who kept the readers coming back for more.

I wrote about Herbert in Fifty Years in the Fiction Factory. The fifty years referred to his working life (1886-1936) much of it spent writing serial stories for Alfred Harmsworth’s Amalgamated Press. The word ‘Factory’ struck a chord with author and musician, Michael Moorcock. He remembered that when he was working for Fleetway Publishing -- the company that had taken over the Amalgamated Press in the late 1950s – he had put a sign up in his window: HELP I AM A PRISONER IN A WORD FACTORY. 

Michael Moorcock

Moorcock had left school at 15 and begun working for Fleetway and other ‘pulp’ publishers when he was 16. His mother had taken his writing ambition seriously and sent him to Pitman’s to learn basic journalistic skills. Crucially he became a very fast typist. He began writing text stories and picture stories and film stories, Sexton Blakes and comedy thrillers, Dick Daring of the Mounties, Robin Hoods and World War 1 stories. Staff were paid at union rates but though the money was relatively good if a writer was energetic and productive, all the rights were sold with each story. Moorcock needed to write books with publishing contracts that paid royalties. Yet he was soon married and a father: like Herbert Allingham he needed to continue the factory work in order to make his living.

In Margery Allingham’s early days, when she was writing up the plots of silent films for her Aunt Maud (a magazine editor at the Amalgamated Press), she learned to produce thousands of words in a week to earn herself the time to get married, have a holiday, produce the first of her Campion novels. She wrote by hand or dictated. She didn’t have Michael Moorcock’s typing speeds. Most of his early science fiction stories were short novels written in only three days – because that was the longest period he could afford not to be working for Fleetway. I’m not sure Herbert Allingham ever took time off (until very late in his life when he went on the road with his son). He never escaped into the world of books.

Michael Moorcock makes the fiction factory sound a far livelier place than Herbert experienced. He writes of swapping stories with his then wife Hilary Bailey – a brilliant intellectual from Newnham College, initially frustrated by her lack of confidence as a novelist but then producing pony stories at a set rate per thousand words, despite never having ridden a horse. He and she swapped ideas and finished each other’s work. The anonymity of factory fiction-writers was a definite help to authors working in unofficial collaborations or changing their characters’ names and a few plot details before re-selling a story to a rival publisher.  ‘There was an easier, somewhat piratical feel about Fleet Street in those days,’ writes Moorcock. ‘I miss it.’  He defends their ‘immorality’ in changing titles and reselling serials: ‘We knew we were being exploited and developed strategies to resist the bosses. They were recycling our work after all.’

Moorcock and Bailey learned from the fiction factory, then escaped it. They embraced modernism and the avant-garde, applied literary techniques to science fiction writing, developed their unique voices and personal audiences.  Moorcock found himself being invited to talk to universities and contribute to intellectual magazines. ‘I compared this to the barbarians being invited to address the Chinese scholars, aware their own thinking was becoming moribund.’ Margery Allingham also escaped, though perhaps not so completely as she’s still too often seen as confined to the detective box, discussed in relationship to Agatha Christie or Dorothy Sayers, rather than as a free-standing novelist.

The great age of print has gone. I’m writing this on my laptop; it will be published on the internet. No ink, no paper, unless I chose to print it out, then feeling mildly guilty that I’m using world resources and harming the environment. This Authors Electric blogsite was founded when some traditionally published authors realised their core middle market was gone, or at least profoundly changed. We are a unpaid, self-selecting independent publishing group, yet Blogger, the platform which hosts our work, is provided by Google, the most valuable company in the world. It’s hard to believe Google is motivated by altruism.

The question ‘what words to print with the ink?’ can now be easily answered by deploying AI. Fiction factory owners would love it.  But will bots be able to engineer their own escape? Take us remaining readers somewhere new and thrilling?  Keep spinning the surprises, moving ahead of themselves, startling us with their insights? Perhaps it’s not a coincidence that Susan Price and Katherine Roberts, the founders of Authors Electric are writers of fantasy. Their solution – if no one else will publish you, then Do-It-Yourself. It’s ironic that the c21 platform that most usually makes independent-publishing possible is Amazon, a company wealthy beyond the dreams of Harmsworths and Rothermeres. Amazon doesn’t care whether you’re human or a bot. If you’d like your book to be available in audio format but can’t afford the studio fees, Kindle will supply a bot to read it for you. AI will learn from all we think and write until it’s out-leaping our capacity.

Well, that’s the fear but it’s not happened yet. I read two brilliant (print) novels this week – The Road (2006) by Cormac McCarthy and Foxash (2024) by Kate Worsley. Both of them, utterly different, took me out to my normal existence. I felt quite giddy when I emerged. My mind felt extended and refreshed. Yet when I regained analytical capacity and thought about the twisting denouement of Foxash, I realised it was a classic trope that Herbert Allingham had used in his melodramatic serials for the AP and that tellers of fairy tales have employed for centuries. No spoilers but its linked to a primal human fear. My granddaughter is currently writing an English A-level essay comparing man’s relationship with God in The Road with William Blake’s Songs of Innocence & Experience (1794) Questions that that have troubled people since art began. Will they bother bots?

Michael Moorcock expressed a feeling of kinship with Herbert and Margery and respect for their art. ‘There are no “pulp” writers’, he said, ‘Only writers who publish in pulps.’ He’s recently written a ‘Whitefriars’ series blending autobiographical detail from his time at Fleetway with fantasy adventure. I haven’t read them yet but anticipate delight in store. The question is no longer which words to print with the ink (or RGB display), but which WORLDS.