Bodley Head

John Lane

The Bodley Head was a publishing firm founded by Charles Elkin Mathews and John Lane. It originally started as an antiquarian bookshop. It was named after Sir Thomas Bodley, founder of the Bodleian Library at Oxford, and the firm used the head of Bodley as its insignia. In the early 1890s the Bodley Head embodied the spirit and aestheticism of the period by specializing in stylishly decorated limited editions of belle-lettres, and by publishing representative works of the English fin de siècle, such as Oscar Wilde’s plays and Aubrey Beardsley’s controversial periodical The Yellow Book. It took on many young poets, notably those of the Rhymers’ Club, a group of London-based poets which included W. B. Yeats, Arthur Symons and Ernest Rhys. After the partnership between Mathews and Lane ended in September 1894, Lane, who retained the firm’s insignia, continued to expand the Bodley Head. Lane died in 1925, and his nephew, Allen Lane, took over the business.

From 1932 to 1935 V. K. Krishna Menon was an editor at the Bodley Head. He launched a series called the Twentieth Century Library, which included Art by Eric Gill, Democracy by J. A. Hobson, Design by Noel Carrington, The Jews by Norman Bentwich, Broadcasting by Raymond W. Postgate, The Home by Naomi Mitchison, Property by H. L. Beales, The Black Races by J. H. Driberg, The Theatre by Theodore Komisarjevsky, The Town by David Glass, Money by M. A. Abrahams, Communism by Ralph Fox and Women by Winifred Holtby. Menon was Jawaharlal Nehru’s literary agent in London, and the Bodley Head published Nehru’s Autobiography in 1936. In 1936 Bodley Head went into liquidation, and the following year it was bought by a consortium of the publishers George Allen & Unwin Ltd, Jonathan Cape and J. M. Dent. Lane left the Bodley Head in 1936 to set up Penguin Books and appointed Menon as the editor of Pelican in 1937.

In 1957 the firm was bought by Max Reinhardt, who successfully expanded the business, publishing authors such as George Bernard Shaw, Charles Chaplin, G. V. Desani, William Trevor, Maurice Sendak, Muriel Spark, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Sam Haskins and Alistair Cooke. Graham Greene, one of the firm’s authors, became its director. In the 1970s the Bodley Head joined Jonathan Cape and Chatto & Windus. In 1987 it was sold to Random House, which continues to publish children’s books under the Bodley Head imprint. It was relaunched by Random House as a non-fiction imprint in April 2008.