The Thinker’s Library

The Thinker’s Library was published by Rationalist Press Association imprint C.A. Watts & Co. between 1929–1951, running to 140 titles. Following on from the Sixpenny Reprints launched 25 years earlier, The Thinker’s Library was designed ‘to meet the tastes, the demand, of the new age’. Like its predecessor, The Thinker’s Library sought to bring key humanist and scientific texts to a wide audience, with each volume priced at one shilling. The first four works were by H.G. Wells, Herbert Spencer, Ernst Haeckel, and Charles Bradlaugh. It went on to produce affordable editions of works by innumerable pioneers in humanist thinking, including Charles Darwin, John Stuart Mill, Leslie Stephen, Llewelyn Powys, Bertrand Russell, Albert Einstein, and L. Susan Stebbing. From 1963, the Rationalist Press Association (through Pemberton Publishing) began to print The Humanist Library, one of the first volumes of which was Hector Hawton’s The Humanist Revolution.