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Gaston Gallimard
France. Gallimard grew out of the literary magazine La Nouvelle Revue française, founded by André Gide and others, whose editors asked him to run its book publishing from 1911. He famously turned down Proust at first, then won him back, and built a list of Camus, Sartre and much of modern French literature, along with the prestigious Pléiade editions. Gallimard remains a family-controlled independent house.
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Alfred A. Knopf Sr.
Born
United States. Knopf founded his firm in New York in 1915 with his future wife Blanche Knopf, who was an equal partner and a formidable editor, and built it on translated European literature and well-designed books marked by the borzoi colophon. Knopf published Thomas Mann, Willa Cather and Langston Hughes. They sold to Random House in 1960 on terms that kept the imprint's identity, which it still has.
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Leonard Woolf
Born
Britain. Leonard and Virginia Woolf bought a small hand press in 1917 and set up the Hogarth Press in their dining room in Richmond, partly as therapy for Virginia. Leonard ran the business side as it grew into a serious publisher of Virginia's novels, T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land and the first English translations of Freud. Owning their press freed Virginia from editors' demands.
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Sylvia Beach
Born
Paris. Beach, an American bookseller, ran the Shakespeare and Company bookshop and lending library on the Left Bank, and in 1922 published James Joyce's Ulysses when no British or American publisher would risk obscenity charges. The edition was financed by advance subscriptions and printed in Dijon. Joyce later moved to a commercial publisher, leaving her with little reward for the risk she took.
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Victor Gollancz
Born
Britain. Gollancz founded his own firm in 1927 and made its plain yellow jackets with bold black and magenta type instantly recognisable on shop shelves, combined with aggressive advertising. In 1936 he launched the Left Book Club, a monthly subscription of political books with tens of thousands of members, and published Orwell's The Road to Wigan Pier for it. He also published bestselling crime fiction to pay for his causes.
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Bennett Cerf
Born
United States. Cerf and Donald Klopfer bought the Modern Library reprint series in 1925, used its steady income to found Random House in 1927, and in 1933 arranged a deliberate test case that won the right to publish Ulysses legally in America. Random House grew from a small independent into a major house, publishing Faulkner and Dr Seuss, before its sale to RCA in 1965 began the era of corporate publishing.
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Geoffrey Faber
Britain. Faber, an Oxford fellow, set up Faber and Gwyer in 1925, which became Faber and Faber in 1929, and hired T. S. Eliot as an editor, a decision that made the house the leading publisher of modern poetry, from Auden to Heaney and Plath. Steady sales of poetry and later of Lord of the Flies kept it independent. Faber remains one of Britain's best-known independent publishers.
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Giulio Einaudi
Italy. Einaudi founded his house in Turin in 1933, aged 21, with a circle of anti-fascist intellectuals including Cesare Pavese and Natalia Ginzburg, several of whom were jailed or exiled. After the war it became the centre of Italian literary and political publishing, from Primo Levi to Italo Calvino, who worked there as an editor. Chronic financial trouble led to its takeover in the 1990s.
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Allen Lane
Born
Britain. Lane, frustrated at finding nothing good to read on Exeter station, launched Penguin Books in 1935 with ten reprinted paperbacks at sixpence each, the price of a packet of cigarettes, and persuaded Woolworths to stock them. The bet on volume and design made quality books cheap for millions. In 1960 Penguin defended Lady Chatterley's Lover in court and won, changing British obscenity law in practice.
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James Laughlin
Born
United States. Laughlin, a steel heir advised by Ezra Pound, founded New Directions in 1936 while still a Harvard student, using family money to publish experimental writers commercial houses ignored, from William Carlos Williams to Tennessee Williams and translations of Borges and Neruda. He accepted that many books would lose money and kept titles in print for decades, a patient model that only his inheritance made possible.
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John H. Johnson
Magazines, United States. Johnson borrowed $500 against his mother's furniture to launch Negro Digest in Chicago in 1942, then Ebony in 1945 and Jet in 1951, glossy magazines covering Black American life and achievement that mainstream publications ignored. He won national advertisers by showing them the buying power of Black readers. Johnson Publishing became one of the largest Black-owned businesses in the country.
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Barney Rosset
United States. Rosset bought the small Grove Press in New York in 1951 and turned it into the home of Samuel Beckett, Jean Genet and the Beat writers. He deliberately published banned books, including Lady Chatterley's Lover and Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer, and fought the obscenity cases that followed, helping end literary censorship in the United States. His risk-taking also left Grove financially fragile.
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Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Born
San Francisco. Ferlinghetti co-founded the City Lights bookshop in 1953, one of the first all-paperback bookshops in the United States, and its publishing arm, whose cheap Pocket Poets series printed Allen Ginsberg's Howl in 1956. He was arrested and tried for obscenity over it and won. City Lights combined bookselling and publishing in a way that kept both alive. He died in 2021, aged 101.
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Margaret Busby
Britain. Busby, born in Ghana, co-founded Allison and Busby in London in 1967 with Clive Allison, becoming Britain's youngest and first Black woman publisher. The small firm published C. L. R. James, Buchi Emecheta and Chester Himes alongside other writers bigger houses overlooked. She later edited the landmark anthology Daughters of Africa and continued to campaign for diversity in publishing.
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Carmen Callil
Born
Britain. Callil, an Australian working in London publicity, founded Virago in 1973 to publish women's writing, and its Virago Modern Classics series from 1978 revived out-of-print novelists such as Antonia White and Rosamond Lehmann in distinctive green paperbacks. Proving there was a market for neglected women writers changed what other publishers kept in print. She died in 2022.
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Tim O'Reilly
Born
Technical publishing. O'Reilly started as a technical writing consultancy in 1978 and built O'Reilly Media on practical computer books with animal engravings on the covers, written by working programmers. The company ran early online publishing experiments and conferences that popularised terms such as open source and Web 2.0. It stayed privately owned, moving from print into an online learning platform.
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Jamie Byng
Born
Scotland. Byng took over Edinburgh's struggling Canongate Books in the early 1990s, in his twenties, and turned it into one of Britain's most successful independents, with bold bets such as the Pocket Canons of Bible books, Yann Martel's Life of Pi, which won the Booker Prize in 2002, and Barack Obama's early memoirs. Canongate showed an independent based outside London could compete for major books.
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