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| Parent company | Penguin Random House |
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| Founded | 2005 |
| Country of origin | United Kingdom |
| Headquarters location | London |
| Publication types | Book |
| Official website | www |
Harvill Secker is a British publishing company formed in 2005 from the merger of Secker & Warburg and the Harvill Press. [1]
Secker & Warburg was formed in 1935 from a takeover of Martin Secker, which was in receivership, by Fredric Warburg and Roger Senhouse. The firm became renowned for its political stance, being both anti-fascist and anti-communist, a position that put them at loggerheads with the ethos of many intellectuals of the time.[ citation needed ]
When George Orwell parted company with Communist Party sympathizer Victor Gollancz over his editing of The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), he took his next book Homage to Catalonia to Secker & Warburg, who published it in 1938. They also published, after 18 months of rejections and setbacks, Animal Farm (1945), and Orwell's subsequent books. [2] Orwell and Warburg later became intimate friends.
Secker & Warburg published other books by key figures of the anti-Stalinist left, such as Minty Alley, World Revolution , and The Black Jacobins by C. L. R. James, [3] Rudolf Rocker and Boris Souvarine, [4] as well as works by Lewis Mumford.
In February 1941, the company launched a series of "long pamphlets" or "short books" called Searchlight Books, edited by George Orwell and T. R. Fyvel. [5] The series was originally planned to include 17 books, but was discontinued after the publication of 10 when bombing destroyed paper stocks.
With its financial position devastated by paper shortages during and after the war, Secker & Warburg were forced to join the Heinemann group of publishers in 1951. During the 1950s and 1960s, Secker & Warburg published the works of, among others, Simone de Beauvoir, Colette, J. M. Coetzee, Alberto Moravia, Günter Grass, Angus Wilson, Michael Moorcock, Melvyn Bragg and Julian Gloag, as well as the British Buddhist Lobsang Rampa.
Heinemann was purchased by the Octopus Publishing Group in 1985; Octopus was purchased by Reed International (now Reed Elsevier) in 1987. Random House bought the adult trade division of Reed Books in February 1997.
Tom Rosenthal (1935–2014), chairman of the Institute of Contemporary Arts, was head of Secker & Warburg from 1971 to 1984. [6] [7]
The Harvill Press was founded in 1946 by Manya Harari and Marjorie Villiers. [8] The imprint was later acquired by the Glasgow-based publishing firm William Collins and Sons, which in 1989, merged with the American publishers Harper & Row to form HarperCollins.
In 1996, Harvill Press became independent following a management buyout. The firm was bought by Random House in 2002, and was merged with Secker & Warburg in 2005 to become Harvill Secker. [9]
As of 2019 [update] , Harvill Secker is an imprint of Vintage Publishing UK. [10]
Animal Farm is a beast fable, in the form of a satirical allegorical novella, by George Orwell, first published in England on 17 August 1945. It tells the story of a group of farm animals who rebel against their human farmer, hoping to create a society where the animals can be equal, free, and happy. Ultimately, the rebellion is betrayed, and under the dictatorship of a pig named Napoleon, the farm ends up in a state as bad as it was before.
Eric Arthur Blair, better known by his pen name George Orwell, was an English novelist, essayist, journalist, and critic. His work is characterised by lucid prose, social criticism, opposition to totalitarianism, and support of democratic socialism.
HarperCollins Publishers LLC is one of the Big Five English-language book publishing companies; the other four include Penguin Random House, Simon & Schuster, Hachette, and Macmillan. HarperCollins is headquartered in New York City and is a subsidiary of NewsCorp.
George Allen & Unwin was a British publishing company formed in 1911 when Sir Stanley Unwin purchased a controlling interest in George Allen & Co. It went on to become one of the leading publishers of the twentieth century and to establish an Australian subsidiary in 1976. In 1990, Allen & Unwin was sold to HarperCollins and the Australian branch was the subject of a management buy-out.
Martin Secker, born Percy Martin Secker Klingender, was a London publisher who was responsible for producing the work of a distinguished group of literary authors, including D. H. Lawrence, Thomas Mann, Norman Douglas, Henry James, Compton Mackenzie, and George Orwell. He began publishing just before the First World War. Secker lived at Bridgefoot House, Iver, Buckinghamshire.
Vintage Books is a trade paperback publishing imprint of Penguin Random House originally established by Alfred A. Knopf in 1954. The company was acquired by Random House in April 1960, and a British division was set up in 1990. After Random House merged with Bantam Doubleday Dell, Doubleday's Anchor Books trade paperback line was added to the same division as Vintage. Following Random House's merger with Penguin, Vintage was transferred to Penguin UK.
William Heinemann Ltd., with the imprint Heinemann, was a London publisher founded in 1890 by William Heinemann. Their first published book, 1890's The Bondman, was a huge success in the United Kingdom and launched the company. He was joined in 1893 by Sydney Pawling. Heinemann died in 1920 and Pawling sold the company to Doubleday, having worked with them in the past to publish their works in the United States. Pawling died in 1922 and new management took over. Doubleday sold his interest in 1933.
Angus & Robertson (A&R) is a major Australian bookseller, publisher and printer. As book publishers, A&R has contributed substantially to the promotion and development of Australian literature. This well known Australian brand currently exists as an online shop owned by online bookseller Booktopia. The Angus & Robertson imprint is still seen in books published by HarperCollins, a News Corporation company.
Fredric John Warburg was a British publisher, who in 1935 founded the company Secker & Warburg. He is best known for his association with the author George Orwell. During a career spanning a large part of the 20th century and ending in 1971, Warburg published Orwell's major books Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), as well as works by other leading figures such as Thomas Mann and Franz Kafka. Other notable publications included The Third Eye by Lobsang Rampa, Pierre Boulle's The Bridge over the River Kwai, Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf and William Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.
Reed Publishing (NZ) Ltd was one of the leading publishers in New Zealand. It was founded by Alfred Hamish Reed and his wife Isabel in 1907. Reed's nephew Alexander Wyclif Reed joined the firm in 1925. It was a New Zealand literature specialist and general titles publisher, releasing over 100 titles a year including a number of significant New Zealand authors such as Barry Crump, Janet Frame and Witi Ihimaera.
"The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius" is an essay by George Orwell expressing his opinions on the situation in wartime Britain. The title alludes to the heraldic supporters appearing in the full royal coat of arms of the United Kingdom. The essay was first published on 19 February 1941 as the first volume of a series edited by T. R. Fyvel and Orwell, in the Searchlight Books published by Secker & Warburg. Orwell's wife Eileen Blair described the theme of the essay as "how to be a socialist while Tory."
Searchlight Books was a series of essays published as hardback books, edited by T. R. Fyvel and George Orwell. The series was published by Secker & Warburg.
The bibliography of George Orwell includes journalism, essays, novels, and non-fiction books written by the British writer Eric Blair (1903–1950), either under his own name or, more usually, under his pen name George Orwell. Orwell was a prolific writer on topics related to contemporary English society and literary criticism, who has been declared "perhaps the 20th century's best chronicler of English culture." His non-fiction cultural and political criticism constitutes the majority of his work, but Orwell also wrote in several genres of fictional literature.
William Collins, Sons & Co. was a Scottish printing and publishing company founded by a Presbyterian schoolmaster, William Collins, in Glasgow in 1819, in partnership with Charles Chalmers, the younger brother of Thomas Chalmers, minister of Tron Church, Glasgow.
Leonard Cooper worked for numerous publishing houses before setting up his own independent publishing house, Leo Cooper Ltd, in 1968.
Ian Angus was a British librarian and a scholar on George Orwell.
Raphael Joseph Feiwel, better known as Tosco R. Fyvel or T. R. Fyvel, was a writer, journalist and literary editor. In 1936–1937, he was active in the Zionist movement in Palestine, then under the control of the British mandate, and worked with Golda Meir.
Critical Essays (1946) is a collection of wartime pieces by George Orwell. It covers a variety of topics in English literature, and also includes some pioneering studies of popular culture. It was acclaimed by critics, and Orwell himself thought it one of his most important books.
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