A Bit of British Giant History (courtesy of Barry Neavill)
Allen Lane, who launched the paperback revolution in the English-speaking world when he founded Penguin Books in 1935, sold a number of Giants in Britain between 1934 and 1936 priced at five shillings. Lane only sold titles that were not copyrighted in the UK. He ordered printed sheets from New York with a special imprint for Lane on the title page—either Bodley Head in the earliest copies or Penguin Books London in the later copies. (Some may have just used Modern Library). The books were bound and jacketed in England.
Beginning in 1936 Hamish Hamilton (Cerf's favorite British publisher) arranged to bring out a number of regular ML titles and several Giants under the imprint Hamish Hamilton (The Modern Library). He imported books in balloon cloth with his own title page from New York and had new and very striking jackets designed in England.
He ran into copyright problems with a number of titles on his original list of 25 titles that were announced to the trade in August 1936. It turned out that many of the titles he thought were ok in terms of copyright were not, and he couldn't sell them after all (he even had the jackets printed when the copyright problems emerged). Cerf and Klopfer preferred dealing with Hamilton, but Lane wasn't out of the picture altogether. He continued to sell a few Giants, and for a time seems to have secured copies of the 2-volume Gibbon from an American wholesaler after Cerf and Klopfer stopped selling to him. Lane could be difficult to deal with and paid his bills very slowly, and at this point Cerf and Klopfer had authorized Hamilton to sell the ML Gibbon. The British ML's never really caught on, and Hamilton's attempts to sell the ML in Britain came to an end with the outbreak of WWII.
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