The publishing house Michael Joseph Ltd was founded by Michael Joseph on 5 September 1935. It was initially set up as a subsidiary of Victor Gollancz, which invested £4,001 4s. 0d. Gollancz and Norman Collins acted as directors with Joseph as managing director. Both publishing houses could save money by sharing premises, packers and accountants. Michael Joseph founded his house at a volatile economic time when many other publishing houses were folding or suffering serious financial difficulties.

Gollancz and Joseph clashed on the direction of the publishing house. Joseph found it difficult to meet Gollancz’s over-ambitious financial targets. Furthermore they did not agree on the type of material the house should publish. In the end, after Gollancz tried to censor Sir Philip Gibbs's Across the Frontiers for political reasons, he bought out Gollancz in 1938.

Joseph managed to build up an impressive list of authors, such as H. E. Bates, C. S. Forester, Monica Dickens, and Richard Llewellyn. He also published a book by Bertrand Russell and D. F. Karaka’s autobiographical book about his time in England, I Go West (1938). Other authors on Joseph’s list included Paul Gallico, Richard Gordon, Vicki Baum, Joyce Cary, and Vita Sackville-West. His publishing house was bought out by Penguin and is now an imprint on its list.

Secker & Warburg is a publishing company formed in 1936 by the merger of Martin Secker's publishing firm with Frederic Warburg's. The company took an anti-facist and anti-Soviet stance and published among other writers George Orwell (after his departure from Victora Gollancz), Cedric Dover, D. H. Lawrence, C. L. R. James, Frank Moraes, and Ram Gopal. In 1951 the company became an imprint of Heinemann, later merged with Harvill and, as Harvill Secker, is now part of the Random House group.

The Bodley Head is a publishing firm founded by Charles Elkin Mathews and John Lane. It originally started as an antiquarian bookshop. It was named after Sir Thomas Bodley, founder of the Bodleian Library at Oxford, and the firm used the head of Bodley as its insignia. In the early 1890s, the Bodley Head embodied the spirit and aestheticism of the period by specializing in stylishly decorated limited editions of belle-lettres, and by publishing representative works of the English fin-de-siécle, such as Oscar Wilde’s plays and Aubrey Beardsley’s controversial periodical The Yellow Book. It took on many young poets, notably those of ‘The Rhymers’ Club’, a group of London-based poets which included W. B. Yeats, Arthur Symons and Ernest Rhys. After the partnership between Mathews and Lane ended in September 1894, Lane, who retained the firm’s insignia, continued to expand the Bodley Head. Lane died in 1925, and his nephew, Allen Lane, took over the business.

From 1932 to 1935, V. K. Krishna Menon was an editor at the Bodley Head. He launched a series called the Twentieth Century Library, which included Art by Eric Gill, Democracy by J. A. Hobson, Design by Noel Carrington, The Jews by Norman Bentwich, Broadcasting by Raymond W. Postgate, The Home by Naomi Mitchison, Property by H. L. Beales, The Black Races by J. H. Drieberg, The Theatre by Theodore Komisarjevsky, The Town by David Glass, Money by M. A. Abrahams, Communism by Ralph Fox and Women by Winifred Holtby. Menon was Jawaharlal Nehru’s literary agent in London, and the Bodley Head published Nehru’s Autobiography in 1936. In 1936, Bodley Head went into liquidation, and the following year it was bought by a consortium of the publishers George Allen & Unwin Ltd, Jonathan Cape, and J. M. Dent. Lane left the Bodley Head in 1936 to set up Penguin Books, and appointed Menon as the editor of Pelican in 1937.

In 1957 the firm was bought by Max Reinhardt, who successfully expanded the business, publishing authors such as George Bernard Shaw, Charles Chaplin, G. V. Desani, William Trevor, Maurice Sendak, Muriel Spark, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Sam Haskins and Alistair Cooke. Graham Greene, one of the firm’s authors, became its director. In the 1970s, the Bodley Head joined Jonathan Cape and Chatto & Windus. In 1987, it was sold to Random House, which continues to publish children’s books under the Bodley Head imprint. It was relaunched by Random House as a non-fiction imprint in April 2008.

Chatto & Windus, a leading publisher of books from the Victorian era, became an important platform for South Asian Anglophone writers. Founded in 1855 by John Camden Hotten, it was sold in 1873 to his junior partner Andrew Chatto, who took on the poet W. E. Windus as a partner. Chatto first published the Indo-Irish writer Aubrey Menen’s novel The Prevalence of Witches (1947). The company continued to publish his works, and went on to publish a significant number of South Asian writers in English. Chatto & Windus’ interest in publishing South Asians appears to date from its acquisition of a controlling interest in Leonard and Virginia Woolf's Hogarth Press (founded in 1917) in 1947, given the latter's close connection and support of South Asian Anglophone writers. Cecil Day Lewis, one of Hogarth’s prize authors, became an editor at Chatto and edited Attia Hosain’s novels. Putnam, later Bodley Head, merged with Chatto in the late 1960s. Chatto then merged with Jonathan Cape (1969) and Virago (1982). The companies retained editorial control until Random House purchased the group in 1987.