The thinking person’s guide to life in an age of ‘Angry Birds’

It is probably an apocryphal story. Allen Lane, passing through Exeter station after a weekend visit to Agatha Christie, scours the bookstall for something to read on his journey to London. Finding only popular magazines and garish reprints of Victorian novels, he resolves to establish a line of high-quality, well-designed paperbacks that would sell for no more than a packet of cigarettes.

He was a man in tune with his times. Lord Reith’s vision for public service broadcasting was coming to fruition at the BBC. The Depression was easing and a new England was emerging – a place, as JB Priestley put it in 1934, “of giant cinemas and dance-halls and cafés, bungalows with tiny garages, cocktail bars, Woolworth’s, motorcoaches, wireless, hiking, factory girls looking like actresses . . . You need money in this England, but not much money”.

Such was the demand for the 10 sixpenny Penguins that Lane published in 1935 that within four months they had sold a million copies. Two years later came the first Pelican, when George Bernard Shaw’s The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism, Capitalism, Sovietism and Fascism inaugurated the non-fiction brand. Its sleek, serious-minded introductions to subjects ranging from Ancient Greece to anthropology captured the spirit of a self-improving age.

Pelican produced nearly 3,000 titles over the next half-century, selling more than 250m copies and losing momentum only in the 1980s, when the feeling grew that it had succumbed to overspecialisation or worse. Andrew Franklin, who worked at Penguin in that period before leaving to set up the publisher Profile, remembers a book with the working title The Plain Man’s Guide to Dentistry. (It never reached the shelves.) In 1990, as Penguin pursued international ambitions and became frustrated that the Pelican trademark was taken in the US, it finally decided to wind the imprint up.

But not, it turns out, for good. This week Penguin Random House – in which Pearson, the owner of the Financial Times, has a stake – relaunched the imprint with titles by, among others, Ha-Joon Chang, the South Korean economist, Orlando Figes, the renowned Russianist, and Bruce Hood, who contributes a digestible read on the shrinking human brain.

The early 6d Penguins were published when the standard price for original fiction was 7s 6d and even budget editions sold for more than 2 shillings. Today’s Pelicans are not so keenly priced – although at £7.99 they will still set you back less than a packet of cigarettes.

The new Pelicans revive not only a design classic – the covers still dazzle in cyan and white – but also the idea of an “informal university”. The texts are pitched somewhere between the output of Allen Lane, Penguin’s most prestigious non-fiction imprint, and Oxford University Press’s successful Very Short Introduction series.

Laura Stickney, commissioning editor for Pelican, talks of the need to bridge a “widening gap in the culture between academic specialists and the public”, and suggests potential readers will be “students, younger readers, autodidacts, anyone looking to fill a gap in their knowledge”.

The Pelicans are flying into a far wealthier society than the one they left for wintering – and a world in which information is far easier to come by. It remains to be seen whether the idea of an “informal university”, seductively aspirational in an age when higher education was the preserve of a small elite, is as attractive now that half of young people enjoy the privilege of attending a real one.

Yet if this is a sign that at least some of the postwar period’s dreams have been realised, it is nonetheless the early Pelicans that seem to conjure up the more hopeful age. “One of the constants of English history is an ever-rising middle class,” wrote Jeremy Lewis as he set the scene for Lane’s triumph in his fine 2005 biography, Penguin Special. No longer. Since the financial crisis we have resigned ourselves to the idea that this has gone into reverse – an anxiety that surely has something to do with the identity of this spring’s unlikely non-fiction bestseller, a 600-page investigation into the causes of social inequality by Thomas Piketty, the French economist.

Books, serious and trivial alike, are also facing stiff competition from other media. Were Lane to make his famous train journey today, it is easy to imagine his pleasure at the quality of literature in the station bookshop being tempered by the sight of his fellow passengers staring intently at phones or tablets – some reading books (perhaps even Pelicans) but many sifting emails or playing hopelessly addictive games.

Laments to cultural decline are nothing new, of course, and they are easily overdone. Yes, publishers of serious non-fiction feel embattled but there is plenty to reassure them, not just in the success of titles such as the million-selling Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman, the psychologist – or, for that matter, Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century. The popularity of online lectures such as TED talks, the continuing boom in literary festivals, even the internet voluntarism epitomised by Wikipedia, all suggest that the self-improving impulse is alive and well. If imprints such as Pelican can tap into it, there will be no need to worry about Angry Birds.

The writer is the FT’s books editor