Teach Yourself

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A photo of a standard Teach Yourself book from 1943

Teach Yourself is an imprint of Hodder Headline that specializes in self-teaching books. The series is most famous for its language education books, but its titles in mathematics (including alegbra and calculus) are also best sellers, and the series covers a great deal other subjects as well. Although the current range of titles is substantial, many of the original titles have been withdrawn. Originally, not all the titles were Teach Yourself.. followed by a noun: for example, Household Electricity, Teach Yourself About the Greeks and Teach Yourself to Fly. Orginally, the inside of the hard covers contained a quotation from Proverbs 9: 'Give instruction to a wise man.... and he will be yet wiser'.

Like many similar series, the Teach Yourself series has always used a common design for all of its books. Most older titles are covered with a distinctive yellow and blue dust jacket, but over the years the publisher has changed the cover design several times, using an all-blue paperback format during the 1980s, a larger photographic or painted front cover with a black stripe containing the title in the 1990s, and recently adopting a yellow rounded rectangle with a black border as their primary logo in the 21st century.

The original Teach Yourself books were published as hardbacks from 1938 until 1973 by the English Universities Press. Most titles published during the Second World War were aimed at helping the British nation survive as well as improving knowledge in the subjects that would improve the war effort.

Books in the Teach Yourself series have been published by Hodder & Stoughton since 1974, who shifted the format of the books to trade paperbacks. They are now available around the Anglophone world and cover numerous subjects, from the series' traditional strength in language education (including multimedia packages) to computers, games, and other crafts and hobbies.

The company now specialises in self-learning courses through books, records, cassettes, compact discs, and multimedia.