Walter Neurath stood in a London office in 1949 and declared his goal to build a museum without walls. He had fled Vienna in 1938 after the Nazi annexation of Austria. His journey took him from running an art gallery at home to producing books for Adprint, a packaging firm founded by Wolfgang Foges. At Adprint, Neurath designed King Penguin Books and created Britain in Pictures, which wove images directly into text instead of isolating them as separate plates. The high cost of illustrated books threatened to keep such works out of reach for ordinary readers. Neurath sought to change that equation through a new publishing house named Thames & Hudson. The name referenced both the River Thames in London and the Hudson River in New York, signaling a dual-market strategy from day one. Eva Feuchtwang joined him as co-founder after arriving in London from Berlin in 1939 with her second husband. She married Neurath in 1950 following the death of his first wife. Their shared vision was to make scholarship and art accessible to anyone who could afford a modest price.
Pioneering Book Packaging Models
Neurath and Foges developed a system where books were conceived, commissioned, and produced before being sold to publishers across different countries. This approach allowed them to create large print runs that lowered per-unit costs significantly. They called this method book packaging and co-edition publishing. In 1949, they established offices in both London and New York to execute this model effectively. By 1956, the company had outgrown its High Holborn location and moved to Bloomsbury Street near Bedford Square. That address remained their home for 43 years until they returned to High Holborn in 1999. The strategy enabled Thames & Hudson to publish ten titles during its first full year of operation in 1950. These included English Cathedrals featuring photographs by Martin Hürlimann and Albert Einstein's Out of My Later Years. The firm grew steadily over time, eventually employing approximately 150 staff members in London alone. Around 65 additional employees worked at subsidiaries scattered globally from Melbourne to Singapore and Hong Kong.