Earlier this month various of my obsessions happily collided in the form of a party at the Isokon Gallery in Belsize Park, north London. The gathering was held to mark the launch of Pocket Penguins, a new list of classics decked not in sombre black, but in bright jackets, each one colour-coded according to the book’s original language (orange for English, of course, but also yellow for Spanish, green for German, and so on). The venue was chosen for its connection to Penguin, something the gallery is currently marking in turn with an exhibition, at the centre of which is the sought-after piece of furniture known as the Isokon Penguin Donkey. Designed by Egon Riss in 1939 (and redesigned by Ernest Race in 1963), it was built to house Penguins in their original A-format (Pocket Penguins are also this size). I have always longed to own one.
The book donkey was the brainchild of Isokon, the company which in 1934 commissioned the architect Wells Coates to design the Isokon building, also known as the Lawn Road flats (the gallery is in what used to be its garage). One of the first modernist buildings in Britain – it looks, from the road, like a magnificent liner – its famous residents included the writers Agatha Christie and Nicholas Monsarrat, artists Henry Moore and Kenneth Rowntree, and Walter Gropius, the founder of the Bauhaus. Also, seven Soviet spies, among them Arnold Deutsch, the recruiter of Kim Philby. Members of the Half-Hundred Club, which met at the Isobar, the building’s in-house restaurant (its chef was Philip Harben), included Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson.
If this sounds interesting and a bit weird, you can find out more in The Lawn Road Flats: Spies, Writers and Artists, a book whose various amazements mostly compensate for its rather plodding style. Its author David Burke, an intelligence historian, reveals that the spies liked the building’s shape: it made surveillance difficult. Perhaps, though, they relished its comforts, too. In 1938 Alexander Foote, a car mechanic who’d fought in Spain with the international brigades, went to Lawn Road to meet his recruiter. The flats, he later wrote, exuded a bourgeois smugness, and his contact there dealt with him “in as brisk and impersonal a way as she would have used to engage a housemaid”.
