Bodley Head has been, since 1987, an imprint of Random House. Originally John Lane and Elkin Mathews — The Bodley Head was a partnership set up in 1887 by John Lane (1854–1925) and Elkin Mathews, to trade in antiquarian books in London. It took its name from a head of Sir John Bodley, eponym of the Bodleian Library in Oxford, above the shop door. After a few years they starting publishing, initially of poets from the Rhymer's Club group, and notoriously of The Yellow Book, edited by Henry Harland. Mathews withdrew from the partnership in 1894.

In the twentieth century it published some mainstream popular authors, such as Arnold Bennett and Agatha Christie, but ran into financial difficulties. It continued after 1936 backed by a consortium of Allen & Unwin, Jonathan Cape, and J. M. Dent. Allen Lane, John Lane's nephew who had inherited control, left to found Penguin Books. Bought in 1957 by Ansbacher & Co., the imprint was still important in the 1970s when it was drawn into the Jonathan Cape/Chatto and Windus group.

The Book of Bodley Head Verse (1926)

Edited by J. B. Priestley. Poets included were:

Lascelles Abercrombie — A. E. — T. B. Aldrich — Kenneth Ashley — Maurice Baring — Aubrey Beardsley — Henry C. Beeching — Arthur Christopher Benson — Archibald Allan Bowman — Mary Brotherton — Emile Cammaerts — Ethel Clifford — Ernest Hartley Coleridge — Stephen Coleridge — Francis Coutts — Lord Curzon Of Kedleston — Olive Custance — John Davidson — Lord de Tabley — Lord Alfred Douglas — Ernest Dowson — Helen Parry Eden — Leolyn Louise Everett — Eugene Field — Darrell Figgis — Norman Gale — Richard Garnett — H. W. Harrod — Stephen Gwynn — John Hay — Alfred Hayes — F. R. Higgins — Katherine Tynan Hinkson — Edmond Holmes — Nora Hopper — Ford Madox Hueffer — E. Pauline Johnson — Herbert Jones — Frank Kendon — Richard Le Gallienne — Arthur E. J. Legge — R. C. Lehmann — Winifred Lucas — E. A. Mackintosh — Alice Meynell — Bernard Miall — Rosa Newmarch — Stephen Phillips — Marjorie L. C. Pickthall — Victor Plarr — Dollie Radford — Dorothy Una Ratcliffe — Ernest Rhys — Lady Margaret Sackville — V. Sackville-West — Sir Owen Seaman — Leonard Shoobridge — Dora Sigerson — John Still — Arthur Stringer — John B. Tabb — Frederick Tennyson — Francis Thompson — Iris Tree — Emile Verhaeren — I. Henry Wallis — Rosamund Marriott Watson — Sir William Watson — Theodore Watts-Dunton — Margaret Woods

See also

• Max Reinhardt