Pelican Books

All Pelican books are available to read online. Read the first chapter for free, and unlock the full book for £4.99.

In 1936, Allen Lane, the founder of Penguin, overheard a woman at a bookstall in King’s Cross station asking for ‘one of those Pelican books’. Presumably she meant a Penguin, but Lane, concerned that his competitors might snatch up bird names, decided to launch a new flock of non-fiction books. The Pelican imprint was born.

Costing no more than a packet of cigarettes, and aimed at the true lay reader, Pelicans combined intellectual authority with clear and accessible prose. As the first British publisher of intelligent non-fiction at a genuinely low price, Pelican became an informal university for generations of Britons. With books on economics and history, art and literature, philosophy and culture, Pelican was, according to the Spectator, ‘a decisive influence on the growth of public understanding of the world.’ Over nearly half a century, the series sold more than 250 million copies, becoming, in Lane’s words, ‘the true everyman’s library for the twentieth century’.

How can we be sure old books were ever read? – University of Glasgow Library

Owning a book isn’t the same as reading it; we need only look at our own bloated bookshelves for confirmation.

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Although this is surely a more common anxiety in a time of relatively cheap books and one-click online shopping we should be reassured that it’s nothing new: Seneca was vocal in criticising those using “books not as tools for study but as decorations for the dining-room”, and in his early 16th century sermons Johannes Geiler (reflecting on Sebastian Brant’s‘book fool’) identified a range of different types of folly connected with book ownership that included collecting books for the sake of glory, as if they were costly items of furniture¹. When we look at our own bookshelves we can fairly easily divide the contents into those we’ve read and those we haven’t. But when it comes to very old books which have survived for hundreds of years how easy is it to know whether a book was actually read by its past owners?²

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