About Us

Dung Beetle are an educational publishing house founded in 1936 in Dunging, a small village in Hampshire renowned for the high quality of its manure. Originally set up by a family of Presbyterian manure workers, the founders set out to deliver to children’s publishing the same fine standards of workmanship and attention to detail as they once did to dung. Dung Beetle’s first success came in 1938 with the publication of Why We Burn Books, an early learning guide to fascism, which sold particularly well in Central and Eastern Europe (see below). Later notable publications include Blitzkrieg for the Under 5s, Let’s Learn about Radiation Sickness, There’s an Immigrant in My Cafe, and Let’s Go in the Strange Man’s Car.

Dung Beetle continue to produce high quality books and early learning tools covering a range of sensitive or difficult topics. Their key goal is simple: To embed core literacy and numeracy skills into the child's first knowledge of evil and death. 

*from shit comes learning

For just as the humble dung beetle gathers faeces from the forest floor in which to lay its eggs, the child also lays ‘eggs of knowledge’ in the turd of its own mind.