Pelican

Pelican

Business Type:

Authored By: Claire Battershill

Pelican Books is a non-fiction imprint of Penguin Books, which began in 1936. The first Penguin paperbacks were colour coded by genre, and the Pelicans were turquoise. They were designed to appeal to a wide audience of non-specialist readers and covered a range of topics including psychology, sociology, religion, politics, and history. The imprint ran until the 1980s and during the course of the twentieth-century sold more than 250 million books. It was relaunched in 2014, with a mandate "to publish truly accessible books from authoritative and award-winning writers on a wide range of essential subjects" ("The Pelican Story").