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.”

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Meet the Team

Diana Tesdell

Diana Tesdell has degrees in history and literature from Harvard and Princeton and has spent her entire career in the Knopf Group, where she oversees Vintage Classics paperbacks and the Everyman’s Library series of hardcover classics. At Vintage she has acquired and edited a number of nonfiction titles over the years, including James Baldwin’s I Am Not Your Negro, Moises Kaufman and Tectonic Theater Project’s Moment Work, and Phillip Lopate’s The Glorious American Essay, and she publishes the annual O. Henry Prize anthology of literary short stories. She recently started a line of Vintage Mystery Classics, featuring new editions of Golden Age mysteries by writers including Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Maurice Leblanc. In a side role as a literary anthologist, she has produced fifteen themed anthologies of classic short fiction for Everyman’s Library, on subjects ranging from New York Storiesto Love Stories to Stories of Art and Artists.