Of the handful of new titles coming this May from the revived line of Pelican Books, the one I’m most excited about is The Domesticated Brain by the experimental psychologist Bruce Hood. The beloved publisher of inexpensive, high-minded titles for the masses is the subject of a Guardian piece by Paul Laity. An excerpt:

“It was the beginning of an illustrious era. Nearly 3,000 Pelicans took flight during the following five decades, covering a huge range of subjects: many were specially commissioned, most were paperback versions of already published titles. They were crisply and brilliantly designed and fitted in a back pocket. And they sold, in total, an astonishing 250m copies. Editions of 50,000, even for not obvious bestsellers, were standard: a 1952 study of the Hittites – the ancient Anatolian people – quickly sold out and continued in print for many years. (These days a publisher would be delighted if such a book made it to 2,000.) The Greeks by HDF Kitto sold 1.3m copies; Facts from Figures, ‘a layman’s introduction to statistics,’ sold 600,000. Many got to the few hundred thousand mark.

‘The Pelican books bid fair,’ Lane wrote in 1938, ‘to become the true everyman’s library of the 20th century … bringing the finest products of modern thought and art to the people.] They pretty much succeeded. Some were, as their publisher admitted, ‘heavy going’ and a few were rather esoteric (Hydroponics, anyone?). But in their heyday Pelicans hugely influenced the nation’s intellectual culture: they comprised a kind of home university for an army of autodidacts, aspirant culture-vultures and social radicals.

In retrospect, the whole venture seems linked to a perception of social improvement and political possibility. Pelicans helped bring Labour to power in 1945, cornered the market in the new cultural studies, introduced millions to the ideas of anthropology and sociology, and provided much of the reading matter for the sexual and political upheavals of the late 60s and early 70s.

The film writer David Thomson, who worked as an editor at Penguin in the 60s, has recalled that as an employee ‘you could honestly believe you were doing the work of God … we were bringing education to the nation; we were the cool colours on the shelves of a generation.’ It was all to do ‘with that excited sense that the country might be changing.”