POSTCARDS FROM PELICAN

Covering subjects from socialism to sex, psychoanalysis to atomic physics, and written by thinkers ranging from Sigmund Freud to Martin Luther King and H.G. Wells, Pelican put expert knowledge within everyone's grasp. Customers queued in the streets for the first Pelican, George Bernard Shaw's The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism, which sold a million copies in six weeks. In the years to come Pelican Books would educate a generation. They became, in Allen Lane's words, 'the true everyman's library for the twentieth century'. Here are 100 iconic covers from that series.