About Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group

Alfred A. Knopf

Alfred A. Knopf was founded in 1915 and has long been known as a publisher of distinguished hardcover fiction and nonfiction. Its list of authors includes Toni Morrison, John Updike, Cormac McCarthy, Alice Munro, Anne Rice, Anne Tyler, Jane Smiley, Richard Ford, Julia Child, Peter Carey, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Michael Ondaatje, as well as such classic writers as Thomas Mann, Willa Cather, John Hersey, and John Cheever.

Doubleday

Doubleday’s century of publishing began in 1897, when Frank Nelson Doubleday formed Doubleday & McClure Company in partnership with magazine publisher Samuel McClure. Among their first bestsellers was The Day’s Work by Rudyard Kipling. Today, Doubleday successfully publishes an array of commercial fiction, literary fiction and serious nonfiction titles. Its imprints include Flying Dolphin Press and Nan A. Talese. Among the bestselling authors published by Doubleday are John Grisham, widely recognized as America’s favorite storyteller, and Dan Brown, author of the international blockbuster The Da Vinci Code. Other bestselling and prize-winning authors currently published by Doubleday include: Margaret Atwood, Pat Barker, Tina Brown, Thomas Cahill, Pat Conroy, Barbara Delinsky, Linda Fairstein, Sebastian Faulks, Myla Goldberg, Spencer Johnson, Thomas Keneally, Jonathan Lethem, Ian McEwan, Bill Moyers, Pope Benedict XVI, Hampton Sides, Jeffrey Toobin, Gore Vidal, and Colson Whitehead.

Pantheon

Pantheon’s founder, Kurt Wolff, was born in Germany in 1887 to a Catholic father and a Jewish mother. He studied German literature and in 1913, founded Kurt Wolff Verlag. Among the authors he published were Franz Kafka, Franz Werfel, and in German translation, Emile Zola, Maxim Gorky, Anton Chekhov, and Sinclair Lewis. Admiring the way young up-and coming American publishers such Alfred A. Knopf and Random House’s Bennett Cerf employed contemporary, cutting-edge artists for text design, book jackets, and newspaper advertising, he did likewise, for which he was criticized by other German publishers.

The deteriorating German economic conditions forced Wolff to close Kurt Wolff Verlag in 1930, and the changing political climate resulted in his decision to emigrate in 1933. He spent several years in France and then in Italy, where he became publishers of Pantheon Case Editrice, which he had co-founded in 1924. Wolff and his wife, Helen, emigrated to the United States in 1941. Within a year, they founded Pantheon Books in a one-room office in lower Manhattan. Wolff specialized in publishing literature in translation by authors such as Hermann Broch, Giuseppe di Lampedusa, Boris Pasternak, Karl Jung and Gunter Grass. He also published important works on art history. In 1961, Bennett Cerf bought Pantheon and it became a part of Random House. Today, Pantheon is part of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group and continues to publish world-class literature. Pantheon’s authors include Julia Glass, James Gleick, Ha Jin, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Alexander McCall Smith, Marjane Satrapi, Art Spiegelman, and Studs Terkel.

Schocken

Schocken Books, founded by Salman Schocken in Germany in 1931, began publishing in the United States in 1945 and became part of Random House, Inc., in 1987. Building upon its historic commitment to publishing Judaica, Schocken’s authors include S. Y. Agnon, Sholem Aleichem, Aharon Appelfeld, Martin Buber, Tikva Frymer-Kensky, Franz Kafka, Francine Klagsbrun, Harold S. Kushner, Joan Nathan, Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, Gershom Scholem, Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz, Elie Wiesel, Simon Wiesenthal, and Dr. Avivah Zornberg

Nan A. Talese

Nan A. Talese is a literary imprint committed to quality publishing, both in the excellence of its authors and the quality of the production of its books.

Established in 1990, it is distinguished both by new authors of fiction and nonfiction, as well as the authors Mrs. Talese has published for many years, writers who have been staunchly supported by independent booksellers (and more recently Barnes & Noble and Borders) and reviewers. Among its writers are Peter Ackroyd, Margaret Atwood, Pinckney Benedict, Thomas Cahill, Kevin Canty, Lorene Cary, Pat Conroy, Jennifer Egan, Mia Farrow, Antonia Fraser, David Grand, Nicola Griffith, Aleksandar Hemon, Thomas Keneally, Alex Kotlowitz, Robert MacNeil, Ian McEwan, Gita Mehta, George Plimpton, Edvard Radzinsky, Mark Richard, Nicholas Shakespeare, Barry Unsworth, and Gus Van Sant.

Vintage

Vintage Books was founded in 1954 by Alfred A. Knopf as a trade paperback home to its authors. Its publishing list includes a wide range, from the most influential works of world literature to cutting edge contemporary fiction and distinguished non-fiction. As the continuous publisher of important writers including William Faulkner, Vladimir Nabokov, Albert Camus, Ralph Ellison, Dashiell Hammett, William Styron, A.S. Byatt, Philip Roth, Toni Morrison, Ha Jin, Richard Ford, Cormac McCarthy, Alice Munro, Raymond Chandler, Orhan Pamuk, Dave Eggers, Robert Caro, Joseph Ellis, Haruki Murakami, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez it is today’s foremost trade paperback publisher.

Anchor

Founded in 1953 Anchor Books is the oldest trade paperback publisher in America. The goal was to make inexpensive editions of modern classics widely available to college students and the adult public. Today, Anchor’s list boasts award-winning history, science, women’s studies, sociology, and quality fiction. Authors published by Anchor Books include Chinua Achebe, Ian McEwan, Alexander McCall Smith, Julia Glass, Karen Armstrong, Anne Rice, Jon Krakauer, Chuck Palahniuk, Mary Gordon, Dan Brown, and Margaret Atwood.

Everyman’s Library

Everyman’s Library was founded on February 15, 1906 with the publication by Joseph Dent (1849-1926) of fifty titles. Dent, a master London bookbinder turned publisher, was a classic Victorian autodidact. The tenth child of a Darlington housepainter, he had left school at thirteen, and arrived in London with half-a-crown in his pocket.

Dent promised to publish new and beautiful editions of the world’s classics at one shilling a volume, ‘to appeal to every kind of reader: the worker, the student, the cultured man, the child, the man and the woman’, so that ‘for a few shillings the reader may have a whole bookshelf of the immortals; for five pounds (which will procure him with a hundred volumes) a man may be intellectually rich for life.’

Milton’s words, “A good book is the precious life-blood of a master-spirit, embalmed and treasured upon purpose to a life beyond life” were printed on the title-pages of the first two Everyman volumes. However, Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson and every Everyman title ever since has carried the motto, “Everyman, I will go with thee and be thy guide, in thy most need to go by thy side” from the medieval morality play, where the character Everyman is comforted by another character, Knowledge, as he sets out on a journey, long hard and dangerous. These lines had come into the head of Dent’s general editor Ernest Rhys as he walked down Garrick Street one day in 1905, giving him, at last, a name for the new series. As he recalled: “Here, unexpectedly, was the waiting word, Everyman’s Library. It took me ere long into the office of the old Chief saying: ‘Eureka! I have found a title.’ For a moment he stared incredulously, and then repeated: ‘Everyman’s Library, you have it!’”

Jane Austen was to be the first British author to have her complete works included in Everyman’s Library, followed shortly afterwards by Dickens, with introductions by G.K. Chesterton. Then came the great Europeans: Dostoevsky, Rabelais, Rousseau, Flaubert, and Stendhal. Near-contemporaries followed: R.L. Stevenson, Henry James, Joseph Conrad, D.H. Lawrence, Somerset Maugham, Virginia Woolf. By 1956 Everyman’s Library had published more than a thousand titles and sold more than fifty million books.

In 1991 Everyman’s Library was relaunched by a small independent company with the support of Random House in the UK and Alfred A. Knopf in the US. The revived library featured a fine, easy-to-read typographic design, sewn cloth bindings, acid-free paper, silk ribbon-markers, and substantial new introductions and chronologies by leading scholars and writers. Pride and Prejudice was the first of fifty titles to be published in September 1991, and within twelve months 130 titles had appeared, including such major twentieth-century classics as Joyce’s Ulysses, Kafka’s The Trial, Lampedusa’s The Leopard, and Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago, none of which had previously been published in Everyman’s Library. Since then, the Library has published Robert Fitzgeralds’s incomparable translations of Homer and Virgil, an edition of Shakespeare with more than 700 pages of magisterial introductions by Tony Tanner, the only complete edition available of Vasari’s Lives of the Painters, Sculptors and Architects, and Allen Mandelbaum’s fine translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy, the only edition to include Botticelli’s extraordinary pen and silverpoint drawings. In 1992 Everyman’s Library launched a series of children’s classics, bringing back into print illustrators such as Aubrey Beardsley, Ivan Bilibin, Walter Crane, Kate Greenaway, Mervyn Peake, Heath Robinson and his brother Charles. This was followed by a hugely popular Everyman’s Pocket Poets series with more than sixty titles in print ranging from popular poets to anthologies.

By the 100th Anniversary in 2006 the list of authors Everyman’s Library publishes has been joined by Achebe, Allende, Bassani, Borges, Bulgakov, Calvino, Camus, Chandler, Penelope Fitzgerald, Forster, Grass, Greene, Hasek, Highsmith, Levi, Mahfouz, Mann, Marquez, Cormac McCarthy, Toni Morrison, Nabokov, Naipaul, Orwell, Plath, Rushdie, Solzhenitsyn, Steinbeck, Svevo, Updike, and Waugh, a catalogue that few publishers can rival in paperback and of course none in hardcover.