Predecessor | Writers and Readers Cooperative, Writers and Readers Publishing, Inc. |
---|---|
Founded | 1974 |
Founder | Glenn Thompson, Sian Williams, John Berger, Lisa Appignanesi, Richard Appignanesi, Arnold Wesker, Chris Searle |
Country of origin | U.S., previously United Kingdom |
Headquarters location | London (1974–87), then New York City (1987–2001), now Danbury, Connecticut |
Distribution | Red Wheel/Weiser/Conari [1] |
Key people | Glenn Thompson Dawn Reshen-Doty Merrillee Warholak |
Publication types | Books |
Nonfiction topics | history, philosophy, politics |
Imprints | Harlem River Press Black Butterfly Children's Books |
Official website | forbeginnersbooks.com |
For Beginners LLC is a publishing company based in Danbury, Connecticut, that publishes the For Beginners graphic nonfiction series of documentary comic books on complex topics, covering an array of subjects on the college level. Meant to appeal to students and "non-readers", as well as people who wish to broaden their knowledge without attending a university, the series has sold more than a million copies.[ citation needed ]
The For Beginners series was launched in the mid-1970s, but became out of print and often unavailable after the 2001 death of co-founder and publisher Glenn Thompson. [2] In 2007, a consortium of investors revived the series, reprinted back issues, and promised to publish between six and nine new issues each year.[ citation needed ] The current publisher is Dawn Reshen-Doty.
This section needs additional citations for verification .(January 2025) |
The company began as Writers and Readers Publishing Cooperative, a London, England-based publisher founded in 1974 [2] by Glenn Thompson, his then-wife Sian Williams, Richard Appignanesi, Lisa Appignanesi, John Berger, Arnold Wesker, and Chris Searle. A publishing cooperative, the founders of Writers and Readers shared the work and the profits. (The Cooperative also operated a London bookshop at 144 Camden High Street until the mid-1980s.[ citation needed ])
The For Beginners series has its origins in two Spanish-language books, Cuba para principiantes (1960) and Marx para principiantes (1972) by the Mexican political cartoonist and writer Rius, pocket books that put their content over in a humorous comic book way but with a serious underlying purpose.[ citation needed ] An English-language version of the first book was published in 1970 by Leviathan Press of San Francisco and Pathfinder Press of New York, with no particularly great impact.[ citation needed ] However, when Richard Appignanesi published (and translated) the first English edition of Marx for Beginners (1976), it was soon clear that the collective had a hit on their hands. [3] [4] With a successful format identified, further For Beginners titles soon began to appear. The line's most enduring titles, all published during this period, were Marx for Beginners (1976), Lenin for Beginners (1977), Freud for Beginners (1979), Einstein for Beginners (1979), and Darwin for Beginners (1982). [5]
In the early 1980s, questions of control arose after some members of the cooperative sold U.S. rights to part of the For Beginners series to Pantheon Books. The cooperative officially disbanded in 1984.[ citation needed ]
Following this rift, in 1987 Thompson took over as sole publisher and moved back to his hometown of New York City to establish a legal foothold and prevent any further unauthorized distribution of titles.[ citation needed ] Based in Harlem, the company was known as Writers and Readers Publishing, Inc.; in moving the company to Harlem, Thompson’s goal was to stimulate a new Harlem Renaissance, in his creating an international publishing house there.[ citation needed ] He also started two other publishing companies: The Harlem River Press, publishing children’s poetry, and Black Butterfly Children's Books, books for the inner-city child.[ citation needed ] The London-based company, formally established in 1992, was known as Writers and Readers Limited. [6] [ dead link ] For years, Thompson spent his time traveling between England and New York to manage the two companies.[ citation needed ]
In 1992, Richard Appignanesi, who had been the first editor in London for the series and had also written several of the titles, co-created the new publisher Icon Books, under whose imprint he republished several of the For Beginner titles and continued to publish and expand a British version of the series called Introducing .[ citation needed ] Meanwhile, the New York-based Writers and Readers continued the For Beginners series, in several cases commissioning new authors to create replacement books for those being published in Britain.[ citation needed ] This led to a number of examples where the two ranges were publishing two different books on the same subject.[ citation needed ]
Thompson died of cancer in London on September 7, 2001;[ citation needed ] by the time of his death, the company had published more than forty For Beginners titles.[ citation needed ]
Several years after Thompson's death, investors decided to buy the rights to the titles, creating For Beginners, LLC.[ citation needed ] In the summer of 2007 For Beginners LLC re-released twenty of the prior For Beginners titles and authorized the first new title, Dada and Surrealism For Beginners. [7]
In 2010, the company released FDR for Beginners by Paul Buhle and Sabrina Jones, with an afterword by Harvey Pekar. [8] [9]
A graphic novel is a long-form work of sequential art. The term graphic novel is often applied broadly, including fiction, non-fiction, and anthologized work, though this practice is highly contested by comics scholars and industry professionals. It is, at least in the United States, typically distinct from the term comic book, which is generally used for comics periodicals and trade paperbacks.
E.C. Publications, Inc., is an American comic book publisher. It specialized in horror fiction, crime fiction, satire, military fiction, dark fantasy, and science fiction from the 1940s through the mid-1950s, notably the Tales from the Crypt series. Initially, EC was founded as Educational Comics by Maxwell Gaines and specialized in educational and child-oriented stories. After Max Gaines died in a boating accident in 1947, his son William Gaines took over the company and renamed it Entertaining Comics. He printed more mature stories, delving into horror, war, fantasy, science-fiction, adventure, and other genres. Noted for their high quality and shock endings, these stories were also unique in their socially conscious, progressive themes that anticipated the Civil Rights Movement and the dawn of the 1960s counterculture. In 1954–55, censorship pressures prompted it to concentrate on the humor magazine Mad, leading to the company's greatest and most enduring success. Consequently, by 1956, the company ceased publishing all its comic lines except Mad.
The Golden Age of Comic Books describes an era in the history of American comic books from 1938 to 1956. During this time, modern comic books were first published and rapidly increased in popularity. The superhero archetype was created and many well-known characters were introduced, including Superman, Batman, Robin, Captain Marvel, Captain America, and Wonder Woman.
Eduardo Humberto del Río García, better known by his pen name Rius, was a Mexican intellectual, political cartoonist and writer born in Zamora, Michoacán.
The Modern Age of Comic Books is a period in the history of American superhero comic books which began in 1985 and continues through the present day. During approximately the first 15 years of this period, many comic book characters were redesigned, creators gained prominence in the industry, independent comics flourished, and larger publishing houses became more commercialized.
Jim Valentino is an American writer, penciler, editor and publisher of comic books, best known for his 1990–1992 work on Guardians of the Galaxy for Marvel Comics, and for co-founding Image Comics, a company publishing creator-owned comics.
Pantheon Books is an American book publishing imprint. Founded in 1942 as an independent publishing house in New York City by Kurt and Helen Wolff, it specialized in introducing progressive European works to American readers. In 1961, it was acquired by Random House, and André Schiffrin was hired as executive editor, who continued to publish important works, by both European and American writers, until he was forced to resign in 1990 by Random House owner Samuel Irving Newhouse, Jr. and president Alberto Vitale. Several editors resigned in protest, and multiple Pantheon authors including Studs Terkel, Kurt Vonnegut, and Barbara Ehrenreich held a protest outside Random House. In 1998, Bertelsmann purchased Random House, and the imprint has undergone a number of corporate restructurings since then. It is now part of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group under Penguin Random House.
TwoMorrows Publishing is a publisher of magazines about comic books, founded in 1994 by John and Pam Morrow out of their small advertising agency in Raleigh, North Carolina, United States. Its products also include books and DVDs.
Lisa Appignanesi is a Polish-born British-Canadian writer, novelist, and campaigner for free expression. Until 2021, she was the Chair of the Royal Society of Literature, and is a former President of English PEN and Chair of the Freud Museum London. She chaired the 2017 Booker International Prize won by Olga Tokarczuk.
Glenn Thompson was an American book publisher and activist. Born in Harlem, New York, he moved in 1968 to England, where he began a community-based bookshop called Centerprise in Hackney, East London, and went on to co-found in 1976 the Writers and Readers Cooperative, best known as publisher of the ...For Beginners series of documentary graphic nonfiction books.
Oscar Zárate is an Argentine comic book artist and illustrator. Zarate studied architecture and had a successful career in advertising in Argentina. He moved to Europe in 1971 and began to work in earnest as an illustrator. He has drawn for the UK comics magazine Crisis. In the Introducing... and ...For Beginners book series he illustrated texts written by Richard Appignanesi, Alexei Sayle, Dylan Evans, J P McEvoy, Angus Gellatly, Rupert Woodfin and Christopher Marlowe. He is perhaps best known in the United States as the artist for the graphic novel A Small Killing written by Alan Moore, one-shot story about a once idealistic advertising executive haunted by his boyhood self.
Ricardo Siri, better known by the name Liniers, is an Argentine cartoonist.
Borin Van Loon is a British illustrator and comic book artist, best known for his illustrations for the Introducing... series of graphic books on complex subjects. He is an author, collagist, and surrealist painter, and has worked for a wide variety of clients in editorial, publishing and promotion. He has created an eclectic collage/cartoon mural on the subject of DNA and genetics for the Health Matters Gallery in London's Science Museum.
A comic book letter column is a section of an American comic book where readers' letters to the publisher appear. Comic book letter columns are also commonly referred to as letter columns, letter pages, letters of comment (LOCs), or simply letters to the editor. Letter columns appeared early on in the history of comic books themselves, and their growing prevalence — particularly beginning in the 1960s — helped create and legitimatize comics fandom. As the forum developed, the volume and tenor of letters became a reliable gauge of overall reader response to developments in the comics themselves. Letter columns remained a regular feature of most comic books until the early years of the 21st century, when they began being phased out in favor of the growing prevalence of email and Internet forums. Despite this, the 2010s saw a renaissance of comic book letter columns, and many comics titles still print them.
The Introducing... series is a book series of graphic guides covering key thinkers and topics in philosophy, psychology and science, and many others in politics, religion, cultural studies, linguistics and other areas. Books are written by an expert in the field and illustrated, comic-book style, by a leading graphic artist.
Penguin Random House Limited is a British-American multinational conglomerate publishing company formed on July 1, 2013, with the merger of Penguin Books and Random House. Penguin Books was originally founded in 1935 and Random House was founded in 1927. It has more than 300 publishing imprints. Along with Simon & Schuster, Hachette, HarperCollins and Macmillan Publishers, Penguin Random House is considered one of the "Big Five" English-language publishers.
Richard Appignanesi is a Canadian writer and editor. He was the originating editor of the internationally successful illustrated For Beginners book series, as well as the author of several of the series' texts. He is a founding publisher and editor of Icon Books. He was founding editor of the Manga Shakespeare series. He is a former executive editor of the journal Third Text, and reviews editor of the policy studies journal Futures.
Darwin for Beginners, republished as Introducing Darwin, is a 1982 graphic study guide to Charles Darwin and Evolution written by Dr. Jonathan Miller and illustrated by Borin Van Loon. The volume, according to the publisher's website, "unravels Darwin’s life and his contribution to biology, and traces the path from his scientific predecessors to the later modifications that his own evolutionary theories required."
Einstein for Beginners, republished as Introducing Einstein, is a 1979 graphic study guide to Albert Einstein and the theory of relativity written by Joseph Schwartz and illustrated by Michael McGuinness.
Leviathan Press was the name of three different small press publishers — one based in San Francisco, one in Baltimore, and one in London.