Items17The creator’s order
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Gaston GallimardFrance. 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…0i - 2
Alfred A. Knopf Sr.Born 12 Sept 1892United 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…0i - 3
Leonard WoolfBorn 25 Nov 1880Britain. 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…0i - 4
Sylvia BeachBorn 14 Mar 1887Paris. 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…0i - 5
Victor GollanczBorn 9 Apr 1893Britain. 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…0i - 6
Bennett CerfBorn 25 May 1898United 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…0i - 7
Geoffrey FaberBritain. 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…0i - 8
Giulio EinaudiItaly. 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…0i - 9
Allen LaneBorn 21 Sept 1902Britain. 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…0i - 10
James LaughlinBorn 30 Oct 1914United 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…0i
