Chatto & Windus

Chatto & Windus
Chatto & Windus
Chatto & Windus00.jpg
Parent company Random House
Founded 1855
Founder John Camden Hotten, Andrew Chatto, W. E. Windus
Country of origin United Kingdom

Chatto & Windus has been, since 1987, an imprint of Random House, publishers. It was originally an important publisher of books in London, founded in the Victorian era.

The firm developed out of the legitimate publishing business of John Camden Hotten, founded in 1855. After his death in 1873, it was sold to Hotten's junior partner Andrew Chatto (1841–1913) who took on the minor poet W. E. Windus as partner. Chatto & Windus published Mark Twain, W. S. Gilbert, Wilkie Collins, Richard Aldington, Frederick Rolfe (as Fr. Rolfe), Aldous Huxley, Samuel Beckett, the famous 'unfinished' novel Weir of Hermiston (1896) by Robert Louis Stevenson, and the first translation into English of Marcel Proust's novel À la recherche du temps perdu (Remembrance of Things Past, C. K. Scott-Moncrieff, 1922), amongst others.

In 1946, the company took over the running of the Hogarth Press, founded in 1917 by Leonard and Virginia Woolf. Active as an independent publishing house until 1969, when it merged with Jonathan Cape, it published broadly in the field of literature, including novels and poetry. It is not connected, except in the loosest historical fashion, with Pickering & Chatto Publishers.

References

  • Oliver Warner, Chatto & Windus. A brief account of the firm's origin, history and development (1973).
  • Knowlson, James. Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett. Simon and Schuster, New York: 1996.
  • John Sutherland, The Stanford Companion to Victorian Fiction, Stanford University Press, 1990, ISBN 0804718423, p.118.

External links

Stub icon This article about a publishing company is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it.