Pelican Publishing Company

American book publisher
non fiction imprint of Penguin Books

Pelican Publishing Company is a book publisher based in Elmwood, Louisiana, with a New Orleans postal address. It was acquired in 2019 by Arcadia Publishing, a leading publisher of local and regional content in the United States. Pelican publishes approximately 60 titles per year and maintains a backlist of over 2,500 books. Most of its titles relate to Louisiana and Southern culture, cuisine, art, travel guides, history, children's books, and textbooks.

Founded in 1926 by John McClure, Pelican's early history was tied to William Faulkner. Its roots were in the Pelican Bookshop on Royal Street, a hangout for New Orleans' literary circle of the time, which included Faulkner, Sherwood Anderson, Caroline Durieux, Grace King, and Lyle Saxon. Its first release was Sherwood Anderson and Other Famous Creoles: A Gallery of Contemporary New Orleans, a book of illustrations by William Spratling with captions and a foreword by Faulkner. Spratling and Faulkner were roommates in a building just off Jackson Square. The book was a play on the Mexican cartoonist Miguel Covarrubias' The Prince of Wales and Other Famous Americans, published the previous year; just as the Prince of Wales was not an American, Sherwood Anderson was not a Creole.

In early 1927, Pelican was acquired by Stuart Omer Landry, who owned the publisher until his death in 1966. Landry, who was born on his father's Alma plantation near Thibodaux, worked in advertising and was a founding board member of the Metairie Park Country Day School. Landry was anti New Deal and a racial conservative, and under him, Pelican published many books advocating white supremacist and segregationist positions, including his own The Cult of Equality: A Study of the Race Problem (1945), The Battle of Liberty Place: The Overthrow of Carpet bag Rule in New Orleans, September 14, 1874 (1955) (a defense of the White League and the Ku Klux Klan), and Rebuilding the Tower of Babel: A Study of Christianity and Segregation (1957). The African American newspaper the California Eagle called Landry "an old line Southerner of the traditional Keep the Negro in Place School." Landry also published the first edition of the Louisiana Almanac in 1949. Historian Lawrence N. Powell described Landry's Battle of Liberty Place as "propaganda, using history to defend segregation and a racial status quo."

After Landry's death, Pelican was bought in 1967 by Hodding Carter, the Pulitzer Prize winning progressive journalist. He renamed the publisher to Pelican Publishing House, but his ownership lasted only three years. In 1970, Carter sold Pelican to brothers Milburn and James L. Calhoun, natives of West Monroe in north Louisiana. Milburn, who became Pelican's publisher and president, was a physician in New Orleans; James, who would be Pelican's senior editor, did public relations work for Louisiana State University. The brothers already owned a similar publisher, Bayou Books of New Orleans. The brothers were, like Landry, conservative; among the first books issued under their ownership was The Real Spiro Agnew: Commonsense Quotations of a Household Word, edited by James Calhoun. By 1998, the headquarters was in suburban Gretna, where a 1998 fire at the publisher's offices and warehouse did an estimated $2 million in damage.

Along with works of local history and other mainstream nonfiction, the Calhouns also turned Pelican into what has been called "the central publishing house of the Neo Confederate movement," including books that helped "found the modern neo Confederate movement." Among the titles it published were Was Jefferson Davis Right?, The Southern Nation: The New Rise of the Old South, Myths of American Slavery, Lincoln Über Alles: Dictatorship Comes to America, and The South Was Right! These and other Pelican books argue that "the Confederacy was the true moral victor in the Civil War the Civil War was not fought over slavery," and "that the South should separate from the North all over again and form its own country." In a 2001 interview with the local weekly Gambit, Milburn Calhoun endorsed secession from the United States ("Oh, we would be much better off that way"), said Southern slaveowners "took care of our slaves because they had value," and that "Racism is not hate based on skin color There are people who devoutly hate Southerners. That’s racism. The most widespread hatred of today is against practicing Christians." The neo Confederate books Pelican published were consistently among its biggest sellers.

Milburn Calhoun died in 2012, after which his daughter Kathleen Calhoun Nettleton became publisher and president. James L. Calhoun died in 2019. During their ownership, Pelican's catalog had grown from 22 books to more than 2,000. In 2019, Arcadia Publishing bought a majority interest in the company. A majority of Pelican's past titles were acquired in the transaction and are now published under the Pelican imprint of Arcadia. Pelican Publishing Company, still owned by the family of Nettleton (who died in 2021), retains rights on the remainder. In 2020, Arcadia Publishing acquired River Road Press, another publisher of books about New Orleans, Louisiana, and the surrounding region. Scott Campbell, River Road's founder, was named publisher of Pelican Publishing and the two company's catalogs were merged. For a period beginning circa 2020, the headquarters was in New Orleans proper. Later that year, it moved to its current location.