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.