Anna Baddeley

Twenty-first century Pelican

I have an idea that will rescue not only civilisation, but publishing too.

It came to me in a second-hand bookshop in Oxford. I was idly browsing their selection of Pelicans from the forties and fifties, sniggering at the barmy ideas in Town Planning by Thomas Sharp and thinking George Bernard Shaw’s Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism, Capitalism, Sovietism & Fascism would make a wonderful ironic present. Then it occurred to me: isn’t it sad we don’t have an equivalent to Pelican today.

For the ignorant among you, Pelican was the non-fiction arm of Penguin’s great project to deliver cheap, intelligent books to the masses. It was set up in 1937 by a noble Welshman called William Emrys Williams who sensed there was a public appetite for accessible titles on history, science, philosophy and current affairs – and was proved right, as these pocket-sized paperbacks with their distinctive blue covers sold in their hundreds of thousands. Though the imprint survived until 1990, Pelican’s heyday was its first two decades, when its serious books chimed with serious times of global crisis, social upheaval and austerity.

As today’s world wobbles on the edge of economic and political catastrophe, I wonder if we will experience a similar hunger for knowledge and big ideas. It would certainly be refreshing after the glorification of ignorance that blighted the late nineties and noughties (and continues to infect Channel 4).

On the surface, the intellectually curious reader of 2011 will be far better served than her mid-twentieth-century counterpart. Serious, popular non-fiction is modern publishing’s greatest asset. Step inside a bookshop and you will see a vast range of books on a vast range of subjects, written by experts and aimed at the layman. Alexandra Harris’ introduction to Viriginia Woolf, Darian Leader on our understanding of madness, Claire Tomalin’s biography of Dickens, Michael Lewis on the European financial crisis – just a few of the erudite yet readable nonfiction titles that have come out recently.

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