Founded in 1887 by John Lane and Elkin Mathews, The Bodley Head existed as an independent entity or as part of multiple consortia until it was acquired by Random House in 1987 alongside sister companies Jonathan Cape and Chatto & Windus.

The Bodley Head acquired several other imprints prior to the Random House acquisition, including Martin Hopkinson and Gerald Howe in 1941, Nonesuch Press in 1953, Werner Laurie in 1957, and Hollis & Carter in 1962.

Also notable amongst Bodley Head's pre-Great War books were the two volume sets: Foundations of the Nineteenth Century (1910 and later editions, selling over fifty thousand copies), and Immanuel Kant, both by Houston Stewart Chamberlain.

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.

During this period Bodley Head published the work of authors such as George Bernard Shaw, Graham Greene, Charles Chaplin, William Trevor, Maurice Sendak, Muriel Spark, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Sam Haskins and Alistair Cooke.