Gollancz : the Story of a Publishing House, 1928 -1978

Victor Gollancz Ltd, London, first edition, 1978. Cloth, 8vo, 24 cm,. 256 pp, [10] leaves of plates, ills. From the blurb - "Few publishers have made such an impact on the twentieth-century literary scene as Victor Gollancz, who fifty years ago started his own firm. Within a very little time it had revolutionized publishing methods in this country, flooding the bookshops with the black, yellow and magenta jackets which were one of its most striking hallmarks, and the newspapers with the bold advertisements that made the name of Gollancz famous within every household where books were read. The story of those fifty years is a varied, very human one, quite unlike the pious and arid sagas of so many publishing houses. To a far greater extent than would normally be the case it is as much the tale of a man as of the firm he created, since for thirty-eight of its fifty years 'V.G.', to all intents and purposes, was the firm. The list of authors whom it has at one time or another published includes some of the most distinguished names of our day: Daphne du Maurier, A. J. Cronin, George Orwell, Kafka, I. Compton-Burnett, Elizabeth Bowen, Colette, Joyce Cary, Dorothy L. Sayers, Margaret Mead, Krish- namurti, Ernest Newman, Léonard Woolf Stravinsky, H. G. Wells, Arthur Koestler - to mention only a few at random. Then there is the Left Book Club, which had such a vast influence on the politicai thinking of a whole generation and even, in the view of many informed people, helped to form history. Finally there is the continuing story in the eleven years since Victor Gollancz died, with the firm which he created inevitably changing but, still independent (as few medium- sized houses now are), vigorously continuing on its way. An ex-library copy with small tapemarks to the pastedown endpapers and abrasion to a small area of the front free endpaper, stamp on verso of the title-page, otherwise Good in dustwrapper.