Thread by @PulpLibrarian

It was a university course for the price of a packet of cigarettes: Pelican Books! Maybe the blend wasn't to everyone's taste, but there's no denying the addictive nature of the range!

Today in pulp I look back at the autodidact's library of choice... #ThursdayThoughts

In 1937, two years after Allen Lane founded Penguin books, the company decided on a new imprint to provide academic and intellectual non-fiction for the general public. Lane believed there was a market for “intelligent books at a low price” which he was determined to serve.

Over its lifetime Pelican sold a quarter of a billion books covering almost 3,000 subjects. Lane apparently came up with the Pelican name when he overheard a woman at King’s Cross railway station mistakenly asking for a Pelican book instead of a Penguin one.

The Pelican imprint was guided by two strong believers in mass education and self-improvement. V.K Krishna Menon worked with Lane at Bodley Head and together they set up Penguin in 1935. Menon was the series editor for non-fiction before returning to a life in politics in India.

W.E. Williams was secretary of the British Institute of Adult Education and would become Pelican’s editor-in-chief in 1937. He later set up the Army Bureau of Current Affairs to educate and raise morale amongst British troops during WWII.

The first Pelican book was George Bernard Shaw's The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism, Capitalism, Sovietism and Fascism, published in two volumes.

As a statement of worthy intent and pedagogy it’s hard to beat!

From WWII into the 1960s the Pelican book was a sign of serious self-improvement. It was the mark of the autodidact, the social reformer, the cultural aspirant. The covers themselves proclaimed the worthiness of the subject matter. Very few people read Pelican books just for fun.

Pelican book design echoed the changes of Penguin books: adopting Jan Tschichold’s vertical design in the early 50s and Romek Marber’s grid layout from 1962. Germano Facetti, Penguin’s influential art director, also ensured a distinct visual style was applied to the cover art.

Pelican books in the 1960s and 70s brought a range of radical writers to the attention of British readers: R.D. Laing, Vance Packard, Noam Chomsky, Stokely Carmichael and many others were published as the ideas of the counterculture began to be taken more seriously.

However Pelicans also looked at economic and management theories, crime, drugs, architecture, history, religion, scientific theory… you name it there was probably a weighty paperback on it somewhere with a pale blue spine for you to learn more from.

The eclectic range of Pelican books meant you never quite knew what you were getting, or how heavy the intellectual going would get. There was certainly no promotion of an academic canon. There was also no guarantee that having bought a Pelican you would make it past chapter one!

Pelican authors could be trenchant, overbearing or just plain dull. That may have caused the downfall of the brand: tastes were changing and books that read like a lecture series were perhaps not what the curious public were now looking for.

The original Pelican range was discontinued in 1984 – though it has recently been revived. That's good news for anyone who believes a visit to a charity shop or second-hand bookstall isn’t really complete without a browse through the Pelicans.

Pelicans were a statement of intent as much as anything: knowledge – no matter how complex – should be available to all at a reasonable price to help us understand and shape the world we live in.

Apparently that’s what people also thought the internet would do. Oh well…