Fayard

• 1. Introduction

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  Fayard, whose complete name is Librairie Arthème Fayard, is a publishing house in Paris that has been printing books since 1857. Today it answers to a larger parent, Hachette Livre, which controls it. That bare fact raises a series of questions. Who has steered a house that has existed across so many generations of readers? Which other publishers has it swallowed up along the way? And what does a French publisher with more than a century and a half behind it actually put into the world? The answers lie in its directors, its mergers, its famous titles and a long run of named book series.

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• 2. Directors Of The House

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  Claude Durand ran Fayard from 1980 until his retirement, a stretch that ended only in 2009. His successor, Olivier Nora, arrived from another corner of the same corporate family. Nora had previously headed Éditions Grasset & Fasquelle, a sister division inside the Hachette group. His own tenure turned out to be shorter than Durand's. On the 6th of November 2013, the group announced that Sophie de Closets would replace him. She officially took over at the start of 2014. Durand's retirement year was also the year the house changed shape in another way, through an absorption in December.

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• 3. Absorbed Houses And Imprints

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  In December 2009, Hachette Littérature disappeared into Fayard. That house had published the Pluriel pocket collection, and its director, Isabelle Seguin, moved over to become literary director of Fayard. An earlier merger had come a decade before. In 1999, Éditions Pauvert became part of Fayard. Pauvert did not vanish from the shelves, since its name survives as one of three imprints under which Fayard publishes. The other two are Éditions Mille et Une Nuits and Éditions Mazarine. A handful of specific titles show what these imprints and the parent house actually print.

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• 4. Prize Winners And Dictionaries

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  Les Égarés, by the French writer Frederick Tristan, won the Prix Goncourt in 1983, France's most celebrated literary award. Fayard published it. The list is not limited to novelists from France. Tropic Moon came from the Belgian writer Georges Simenon, and Sorbonne Confidential came from the American author Laurel Zuckerman. Scholarship has a place too. The French historian Jean Favier wrote the Dictionnaire de la France médiévale, a reference work on medieval France that appeared under the Fayard name. Beyond single books, the house has built whole shelves of series, some of them dating back to the 1890s.

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• 5. A Century Of Collections

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  La Bibliothèque universelle de poche arrived in 1894, and Modern-Bibliothèque followed in 1904. Le Livre populaire appeared a year after that, in 1905. Another series, Le Livre de demain, ran from 1923 to 1947. The mid-century brought Leçons inaugurales du Collège de France in 1950 and Voici la France in 1958. In 1974, the house opened Recherches avancées, with Raymond Abellio as series editor. Les Enfants du fleuve began in 1990 under Jean-Claude Didelot, and Pour une histoire du XXe siècle followed in 1991. Histoire de la pensée dates from 1999. Fayard noir ran from 2004 to 2009. The latest entry in the record is À venir, from 2009, edited by Geoffroy de Lagasnerie.

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