Weidenfeld & Nicolson

• 1. Introduction

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  Weidenfeld & Nicolson, known in the trade as W&N or simply Weidenfeld, is a British publisher of fiction and reference books. It was launched in 1949 at a reception held in Brown's Hotel in London. The firm has changed hands more than once since then. Its name has stayed on the spines. Who stood behind that first reception? Which books gave the firm its reputation? And how did a house founded by two people end up inside a much larger group? The chapters ahead take those questions in turn.

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• 2. Two Founders

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  George Weidenfeld and Nigel Nicolson are the two men whose surnames make up the company's name. They founded the firm together in 1949.

  Nicolson also became one of the firm's authors. In 1973 the company published his Portrait of a Marriage, a frank biography of his own parents, Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson. It is a rare case of a founder writing about his family and seeing the book appear under his own name on the publisher's list.

  By the time that book appeared, the firm had been publishing for more than two decades.

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• 3. The Early Catalogue

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  Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita, published by the firm in 1959, is the title most often linked with its early years. It is one of the significant books the house put out.

  Isaiah Berlin, Hugh Trevor-Roper and Rose Macaulay all appeared on the nonfiction side in those early years. On the fiction side, the list carried novels by Mary McCarthy and Saul Bellow.

  The list kept widening as time went on. The firm later issued titles by world leaders and by historians. It also published contemporary fiction and glossy illustrated books.

  Arthur Baker Ltd joined the firm in 1959, the same year as Lolita. Weidenfeld & Nicolson ran it as an imprint, and it continued into the 1990s, a decade that would bring a change of ownership.

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• 4. Series Lists

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  The Illustrated Novel Library, Lives, Pleasures and Treasures, World University Library and The Young Historian Books are the named series linked to the firm. Titles such as the Illustrated Novel Library and the World University Library point to a list that spanned fiction and serious study.

  The Young Historian Books had a series editor, Patrick Moore.

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• 5. The Orion Years

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  Since 1991 Weidenfeld has been a division of the French-owned Orion Publishing Group. It was among the first acquisitions Orion made after the group was founded, and it formed the core of what Orion offered.

  Phoenix was one of the imprints Weidenfeld held at that point, and it was Weidenfeld's own much earlier creation. J. M. Dent, bought in 1988 together with its Everyman series, was another.

  The Everyman Library hardcover rights were sold in 1991 and survive as a Random House property. Paperbacks of Everyman Classics stayed with Orion.

  Hachette Livre acquired Orion itself in 1998. Then, in January 2002, the Cassell imprints, among them Cassell Reference and Cassell Military, were joined with the Weidenfeld imprints in a new division. That division took the name Weidenfeld & Nicolson, carrying the founders' names into a combined operation.

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• 6. I Am Malala

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  I Am Malala is the memoir of the Pakistani-born teenager Malala Yousafzai, written with Christina Lamb. W&N published the British edition late in 2013.

  The American edition came from Little, Brown, a subsidiary of Hachette. The two imprints were in effect sister companies, issuing the same book on opposite sides of the Atlantic.

  Yousafzai is a female education activist. She won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2014, the year after the book appeared.

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