The Bodley Head

• 1. Introduction

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  The Bodley Head began with a piece of sculpture. Above the door of a London bookshop in 1887 sat a bust of a man long dead, and the shop took its name from him. Over the following century and more, that name appeared on the first Penguin books, on a notorious literary periodical, and on one of the most admired children's lists in modern publishing. Who was the man above the door? What did the shop sell before it printed a single title of its own? How did a small firm come to launch the publisher that would eclipse it? And why does the name still sit on books today?

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• 2. The Name Over the Door

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  Elkin Mathews and John Lane first traded as a partnership under their own names, Elkin Mathews and John Lane. Both were booksellers, and their business was antiquarian books, sold from a shop in London. The head above the entrance belonged to Sir Thomas Bodley. He is the eponymist of the Bodleian Library in Oxford, so a bust of him suited a shop that dealt in old volumes. Customers and passers-by soon used the shop's decoration as its name. The partners were still selling rare books when a new idea arrived in 1894, and it would turn them from dealers into publishers.

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• 3. Stylish Decadence

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  In 1894, Lane and Mathews began publishing works of what the source calls 'stylish decadence'. The best known of these was The Yellow Book, a literary periodical that earned a notorious reputation. Serious scholarship also found a place on the list before the Great War. Houston Stewart Chamberlain wrote two two-volume sets for the firm, Foundations of the Nineteenth Century and Immanuel Kant. The first appeared in 1910, and it went through later editions and sold over fifty thousand copies. During the first decade of the twentieth century a manager named Herbert George Jenkins worked at the firm. In 1912 he left to set up his own publishing house.

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• 4. The Penguin Experiment

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  The Bodley Head became a private company in 1921, and by 1926 it was putting out the Book of Bodley Head Verse, an anthology edited by J. B. Priestley. Its authors included Arnold Bennett and Agatha Christie, and it issued a book series called the Twentieth Century Library, edited by V. K. Krishna Menon. Even so, money was short. Control had passed to Allen Lane, the nephew of John Lane, and in 1935 he published the first Penguins under The Bodley Head imprint. The covers carried both names, Penguin Books and The Bodley Head. A year later, in 1936, Allen Lane left to found Penguin Books as a company in its own right. The firm he left behind needed new backers.

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• 5. Consortia and Acquisitions

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  After 1936 the Bodley Head carried on with the support of a consortium made up of Allen & Unwin, Jonathan Cape, and J. M. Dent. In 1941 the firm, now trading as John Lane the Bodley Head, took over two smaller houses, Gerald Howe Ltd and Martin Hopkinson & Co. Their authors included Cecil Day Lewis and H. L. Mencken. Further imprints followed: Nonesuch Press in 1953, Werner Laurie in 1957, and Hollis & Carter in 1962. The year 1957 also brought a change of owner, because Ansbacher & Co., headed by Max Reinhardt, bought the firm.

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• 6. The Reinhardt Years

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  Under Max Reinhardt, the Bodley Head published George Bernard Shaw, Graham Greene and Charles Chaplin. The list also included William Trevor, Maurice Sendak, Muriel Spark and Alexander Solzhenitsyn, alongside Sam Haskins, Winston Graham and Alistair Cooke. Reinhardt was also responsible for expanding one of the outstanding children's lists in modern publishing. The imprint was still important in the 1970s, when it was drawn into the Jonathan Cape and Chatto & Windus group. That group's story would lead to its next and largest sale.

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• 7. Random House and the Relaunch

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  In 1987 Random House bought The Bodley Head, together with its sister companies Jonathan Cape and Chatto & Windus. The new owner kept the name alive on children's books, and it did so until April 2008. That month Random House relaunched the imprint as an adult non-fiction list inside the Vintage Books division. It set out two main strands. One was books 'of scholarship in both the humanities and sciences'. The other was books which 'contribute to the intellectual and cultural climate of our times'. The paper record of the earlier firm survives separately, since the archives of The Bodley Head Ltd are kept at Reading University.

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