Narnia, Dates, Links to Text (no illustrations), Original Publishers

The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe

October 16th, 1950

Prince Caspian

October 15th, 1951

The Voyage of the Dawn Treader

September 15th, 1952

The Silver Chair

September 7th, 1953

The Horse and His Boy

September 6th, 1954

The Magician's Nephew

May 5th, 1955

The Last Battle

September 4th, 1956

This book is in the public domain in Canada, and is made available to you DRM-free. You may do whatever you like with this book, but mostly we hope you will read it.

Geoffrey Bles:

Bles entered publishing in 1923. Geoffrey Bles Limited were general publishers, but with a specialism in religion and translated works. Among the authors Bles published were: C.S. Lewis, J.B. Phillips, Cecil Street, Mabel Lethbridge, Halliday Sutherland, Vicki Baum,[5] and Maria von Trapp.[6]

The Bodley Head:

Herbert George Jenkins was a manager at the firm during the first decade of the twentieth century, before leaving to set up his own publishing house in 1912.[2] The Bodley Head became a private company in 1921. In 1926 it published the Book of Bodley Head Verse, an anthology edited by J. B. Priestley. The firm published some mainstream popular authors such as Arnold Bennett and Agatha Christie and the book series, Twentieth Century Library (edited by V. K. Krishna Menon),[3][4] but ran into financial difficulties. Allen Lane, John Lane's nephew who had inherited control, left in 1936 to found Penguin Books. Before Allen Lane's new company was established, however, he published the first Penguins in 1935 under the imprint of The Bodley Head. Both "Penguin Books" and "The Bodley Head" appeared on the cover.

The Bodley Head continued after 1936 backed by a consortium of Allen & Unwin, Jonathan Cape, and J. M. Dent. In 1941, John Lane the Bodley Head took over two smaller publishing houses, Gerald Howe Ltd and Martin Hopkinson & Co., whose authors included Cecil Day Lewis and H. L. Mencken.[5]