Imprints


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 was founded 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 and its Nan A. Talese imprint publish an array of commercial fiction, literary fiction and serious nonfiction titles. Among the bestselling and prize-winning authors published by Doubleday are Anne Applebaum, Pat Barker, Dan Brown, Bill Bryson, Lincoln Child, George Friedman, David Grann, John Grisham, Mark Haddon, Heidi Julavits, Michio Kaku, Jon Krakauer, Jonathan Lethem, Candice Millard, Chuck Palahniuk, Edward Rutherfurd, Hampton Sides, Jeffrey Toobin, and Colson Whitehead. Nan A. Talese authors include Peter Ackroyd, Margaret Atwood, Thomas Cahill, Pat Conroy, Valerie Martin, and Ian McEwan.


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 WolffVerlag. 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.


Vintage Books

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 Books

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.


Vintage Español

A division of Random House, Inc., was founded in 1994 as a distinguished group seal Alfred A. Knopf in an effort to publish selected works of fiction and nonfiction in Spanish. Since then, it has expanded to become one of the largest Spanish-language publishers in the United States, offering a growing list of titles across a wide variety of genres, including, in addition to fiction and nonfiction, sports, spirituality, self-help, personal finance and cooking, to name a few. Our authors include Gabriel García Márquez, Roberto Bolaño, Ken Follett, Isabel Allende, Junot Diaz, Dr. Isabel Gomez-Bassols, Jorge Amado and Cristina Garcia, among many others


Black Lizard

Vintage Crime/Black Lizard was founded in June 1990 after Random House’s acquisition of Black Lizard, the publishing company created by Donald S. Ellis and Barry Gifford. Before the acquisition Vintage Books was publishing the work of American mystery-authors such as Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain and Raymond Chandler under Vintage Crime. As a result of the unification Random House came into the possession of the literature of Jim Thompson, and David Goodis, along with that of many other noir writers. Vintage Crime/Black Lizard is one of the preeminent publishers of crime fiction in the United States and asserts that it remains devoted to the best of “classic crime”, having added Eric Ambler, Chester Himes and Ross Macdonald to their list of authors.


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.


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.”