Thames & Hudson

• 1. Introduction

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  Thames & Hudson has been putting museum-quality art into the hands of ordinary readers since 1949. Its founder, Walter Neurath, had a phrase for what he was trying to build: a "museum without walls". That phrase captures everything the company stands for. Art books had long been expensive, specialist objects. Neurath wanted to change that. What drove a Viennese gallery owner to London, and then to build one of the world's largest illustrated book publishers from scratch? And how did a company named after two rivers come to span five continents?

• 2. A Viennese Beginning

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  Walter Neurath was born in Vienna in 1903. Before he ever set foot in London, he had already run an art gallery and published illustrated books in Austria. When he left Vienna in 1938, he carried those instincts with him.

  In London, he found work at Adprint, a book-packaging company that had been set up by another Viennese emigre, Wolfgang Foges. As production director there, Neurath's fingerprints went onto two significant projects. He designed and produced the hardback King Penguin Books, and he developed a series called Britain in Pictures. That second project was quietly radical: it wove images and text together on the page, rather than bundling all the photographs into separate plates sections at the back.

  That integration of image and word would become the signature of everything Neurath later built. He and Foges also helped pioneer the idea of book packaging and co-edition publishing. The logic was economic. If you could sell the same book simultaneously to publishers in many countries and languages, you could justify a large print-run and bring the unit cost down sharply. Neurath filed that lesson away. He would use it as the financial engine of his next venture.

• 3. Founding and the Two Rivers

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  By 1949, Neurath was ready to move beyond Adprint. He founded his own publishing house that year, opening offices in both London and New York at the outset. The name he chose, Thames & Hudson, told the story plainly: one river for Britain, one for North America, two markets from day one.

  Eva Feuchtwang was his co-founder. She had arrived in London from Berlin in 1939, with her second husband. She and Neurath married in 1950, after the death of his wife, and she took the name Eva Neurath. The partnership was personal and professional in equal measure.

  In its first year of trading, 1950, the company published ten titles. Among them were English Cathedrals, with photographs by Martin Hurlimann, and Albert Einstein's Out of My Later Years. Ten titles in a first year was a modest start, but the ambition behind each one was clear: serious scholarship, brought within reach of a general reader.

• 4. Series That Defined a Publisher

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  In 1958, Thames & Hudson launched a pocket-sized series with black spines called the World of Art. Within seven years it had grown to 49 titles. Today it counts over 300. The design was deliberately approachable, the price kept low, and the subjects stretched across painting, sculpture, architecture, and beyond.

  Ancient People and Places, edited by the archaeologist Glyn Daniel, eventually ran to over 100 titles on its own. The large-format Great Civilizations series began in 1961 and brought in contributors including Alan Bullock, Asa Briggs, Hugh Trevor-Roper, A. J. P. Taylor, and John Julius Norwich. These were not lightweight popular surveys. They were written by leading scholars but produced with the general reader firmly in mind. That combination, rigorous content in an accessible and visually rich format, was the house style.

  By 1956, the company had already outgrown its first offices at High Holborn and moved to Bloomsbury Street, just off Bedford Square, which was then the heart of London's publishing trade. It stayed there for 43 years before moving back to High Holborn in 1999.

• 5. Family Stewardship

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  Walter Neurath died in 1967, aged 63. Eva Neurath took over as chairman and held that role until her own death in 1999. The generational handoff had already begun before Walter died: his son Thomas, born in 1940, and his daughter Constance had both joined the company in 1961. Thomas became managing director on his father's death. Constance served as art director for several decades.

  Both siblings sat on the board of directors. As of 2025, Thomas's daughters Johanna and Susanna had joined them there. Thomas Neurath died in 2025. The company that Walter and Eva built has now passed through three generations of the same family and remains independent, with over 2,000 titles in print.

  In 2023, Thames & Hudson expanded its catalogue by acquiring the back catalogues and rights to future titles from two small British independent publishers: Unit Editions, which specialises in books about graphic design, and Read-Only Memory, known as ROM, which focuses on video game history. That move into gaming books signals where illustrated publishing is heading next.