Bodley Head

About Bodley Head

The Bodley Head is a London publisher founded in 1887 by John Lane and Elkin Mathews, who named their antiquarian bookshop after a bust of Sir Thomas Bodley over the door; it is now an adult non-fiction imprint of Vintage at Penguin Random House.

The firm became known in the 1890s for The Yellow Book, which it published from 1894. Under John Lane it gave Agatha Christie her start: her first novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, appeared from Lane in New York in October 1920 and from The Bodley Head in London on 21 January 1921, followed by the London edition of The Murder on the Links in May 1923, two months after Dodd, Mead's American first. Arnold Bennett was another popular author on the list. The company became private in 1921, and in 1935 Lane's nephew Allen Lane launched the first Penguin paperbacks under the Bodley Head imprint before leaving in 1936 to run Penguin Books.

After 1936 the firm was backed by Allen & Unwin, Jonathan Cape and J. M. Dent. In 1957 it was bought by Ansbacher & Co., led by Max Reinhardt, under whom it published George Bernard Shaw, Graham Greene and Maurice Sendak. In the 1970s it joined the Chatto and Cape group, which Random House bought in 1987. It published children's books under the Bodley Head name until 2008, when it was relaunched as a non-fiction imprint.

How to spot a Bodley Head first edition