Publisher Information

Nonesuch Press

In 1922, Francis Meynell founded Nonesuch Press, along with his second wife Vera Mendel, and their mutual friend David Garnett, co-owner of Birrell & Garnett’s bookshop in Soho’s Gerrard Street. The first book published by the London-based private press was a volume of John Donne’s Love Poems was issued in May 1923.

In attempts to produce book designs with the quality of a fine-press but availability to a wider audience at lower prices, Nonesuch used…

Olympia Press

Paris-based Olympia Press was launched in 1953 by Maurice Girodias as a rebranded version of the Obelisk Press. Publishing erotic fiction and avant-garde literary fiction, Olympia specialized in books that could not legally be published in the English-speaking world. It is thought that Girodias correctly assumed that the French, who were either unable to read to books or simply more sexually tolerant, would not be as resistant to certain books.

Olympia is perhaps best known for…

Origin Press

Origin Press was an American poetry magazine founded by Cid Corman in 1951. The magazine provided an early platform for the work of ground-breaking poets and was devoted, primarily, to one writer in each issue. Origin Press shifted locations with the editor’s own moves, beginning in Ashland, Massachusetts, moving to Kyoto, Japan, back to Boston, and returning to Japan again as Corman resettled. As a result, the first series was published in Dorchster, Mass.…

Oxmoor House

Oxmoor House is the book publishing division of Southern Progress Corporation based in Birmingham, Alabama. The company was founded in 1979 with the first publication of Southern Living’s Southern Living Annual Recipes. Today, Oxmoor House publishes “books to enrich your life,” focusing on topics like cooking and entertaining, crafts and hobbies, diet and health, gardening, house and home, and self-improvement for brands such as Southern Living, Cooking Light, Sunset, Coastal Living, Health, All You, This…

Paladin Press

Paladin Press came into existence in September 1970 when Peder Lund joined Robert K. Brown as a partner in a book-publishing venture previously known as Panther Publications. Both Lund and Brown were convinced there was a market for books on specialized military and action/adventure topics. Paladin’s first book, 150 Questions for a Guerrilla, was by Gen. Alberto Bayo, a Communist veteran of the Spanish Civil War. Previously, Bayo’s book, which advocated state-of-the-art theories…

Pantheon Books, Inc.

One of the first to publish and promote Franz Kafka and Franz Werfel, Kurt Wolff founded his first publishing company, Kurt Wolff Verlag, in Germany in 1913. However, the deteriorating German economic conditions soon forced Wolff to close Kurt Wolff Verlag. Wolff moved to France and then Italy, where he became publisher of Pantheon Casa Editrice, which he had co-founded in 1924. After he and his wife were separately interned and then released following the…

Pascal Covici

Pascal “Pat” Covici was born in Romania, but spent the later years of his childhood in Chicago. After attending both the University of Michigan and the University of Chicago, Covici’s first publishing venture began when he partnered with William “Billy” McGee in 1922. The two established a publishing company and bookstore in Chicago, which became a popular spot for writers. Covici-McGee’s first title published was Ben Hecht’s 1001 Afternoons In Chicago (1922). The memoir…

Pathfinder Press

Pathfinder Press was established in New York City in 1969 as a successor to Pioneer Publishers and Merit Publishers, and has been associated with the Socialist Workers Party (SWP). As the publishing arm of the SWP, Pathfinder and its predecessors have been publishers of works of Marxist theory and of socialist political analysis and commentary. They have also been the principal English-language publishers of writings of Leon Trotsky as well as documentary…

Penn Publishing Company

Charles C. Shoemaker founded Penn Publishing Company in 1889. After the success of its elocution and recitation publications, Penn began to publish plays for amateurs and entertainment and education handbooks. In the early 1900s, Penn found its niche with the publication of boys’ and girls’ series books. By 1927, juvenile books accounted for seventy-five percent of Penn’s publications, while it continued to maintain several strong niches, including books on hunting and fishing.

Phaidon Press

With over 1,500 titles in print, Phaidon Press is one of the leading international art book publishers. But that wasn’t the original goal. When Dr. Bela Horovitz and Ludwig Goldscheider founded the press in Vienna in 1923, they wanted to publish literature, philosophy, and history. One of its first books published was a German edition of Plato’s works. Horovitz and Goldscheider were so passionate about those particular markets, they named the press Phaidon, the German…

Philosophical Library

Philosophical Library is a small publishing house based in New York City specializing in psychology, philosophy, religion, and history. It has been a consistent and reliable source for serious readers, libraries, academic institutions, and booksellers worldwide. Founded in 1941 by Romanian-born philosopher and scholar Dagobert D. Runes, the original aim of Philosophical Library was to publish the works of European intellectuals Runes admired and had befriended, many of whom fled America in the 1930s.

The…

Picador

Picador is an imprint of Pan Macmillan in the United Kingdom and Australia and of Macmillan Publishing in the United States. (Georg von Holtzbrinck Publishing Group owns both companies.) The imprint was launched in the UK in October 1972 with the aim of publishing outstanding international writing in paperback. Picador’s first eight titles include: Rosshalde by Hermann Hesse, A Personal Anthology by Jorge Luis Borges, Trout Fishing in America by Richard Brautigan, The…

Pineapple Press

Pineapple Press is a prime example of an independent niche publisher. Since 1982, founders David and June Cussen have been publishing trade books, specializing in Florida and the Southeast, out of their home in Sarasota, FL. Many of Pineapple Press’ titles are geared towards educating and entertaining a variety of visitors — from Baseball in Florida for the MLB spring-training fanatics to a reference book titled Florida’s Birds with glorious artwork by world-renowned nature…

Pioneer Publishers

Pioneer Publishers was the original Trotskyist publishing house in the US, based out of New York City. Pioneer was established in 1930 founded by Max Shachtman in affiliation with the Communist League of America (predecessor of the Socialist Workers Party). As it became the official publishing arm of the SWP, Pioneer primarily published of works of Marxist theory and of socialist political analysis and commentary. The publishing house, along with its successors, have also been…

Progress Publishers

Though it was first founded in 1931, Moscow-based Progress Publishers of the Soviet Union gained notoriety after it took over the role of the Foreign Languages Publishing House ? the state-run publisher of Russian literature, novels, propaganda, and books about the USSR in foreign languages ? in 1963. In this, Progress became known for “Short History of USSR,” the ABC series (ABC of Party, ABC of Socialism, ABC of Dialectical Materialism, etc.) and the…

R. R. Bowker

R.R. Bowker LLC, provider of bibliographic information on published works to the book trade, including publishers, booksellers, libraries, and individuals, was originally founded by Frederick Leypoldt, a German immigrant. Leypoldt worked as a bookseller and recognized the need for good bibliographic information to make the book business more efficient. In 1868, he published his first periodical: the monthly Literary Bulletin. Over the next decade, Leypoldt remained steadily productive, issuing the first edition of Annual American…

Real People Press

In 1967, Steve and Connirae Andreas founded Real People Press in Lafayette, California, with the goal making cutting edge books in the realm of personal change and growth available to the general public. Gestalt therapy was another original area of focus for the press. Some of the first titles published by Real People Press include: From Person to Person (1967) by Carl Rogers and Barry Stevens, Fritz Perls’s Gestalt Therapy Verbatim (1968) as well…

Riverside Press

Also known as Riverside Publishing Company and Riverside Book Co.

Henry Oscar Houghton, a one-time mayor and long-time resident of Cambridge, Massachusetts, founded Riverside Press in an old building along the banks of the Charles River in 1852. Soon after its establishment, the printing plant attracted several significant publishing firms and established publishing contracts with Atlantic Monthly and G. & C. Merriam Company, among others. In 1880, Houghton partnered with George Mifflin to found Houghton Mifflin…

Rizzoli International

Founded in 1927 by entrepreneur Angelo Rizzoli as A. Rizzoli & Co., the company entered into the press industry by buying out four national magazines. In 1974, Rizzoli entered into the publishing industry and has since become a leader in the fields of art, architecture, interior design, photography, haute couture, and gastronomy. The company is internationally recognized for its diverse range of titles as well as its high standard of content, design, and production.

After…

Rodale Press

In 1930, J.I. Rodale, widely recognized as the father of the American organic movement, originally founded Rodale Inc., publisher of health and wellness magazines and books. Soon after putting some of his revolutionary horticulture theories into practice on a 60-acre farm near Emmaus, Pennsylvania, Rodale launched Organic Farming and Gardening Magazine, which taught readers how to grow better food by cultivating healthier soil using natural techniques, in 1942. Known today as Organic Gardening, the publication…