Gerald Duckworth and Company Ltd
Encyclopedia
History
Founded in 1898 by Gerald DuckworthGerald Duckworth
Gerald de l'Etang Duckworth was a British publisher.-Background and early life:Duckworth was a son of Herbert Duckworth, a London barrister, by his wife Julia Jackson. His middle name, de l'Etang, was the surname of one of his mother's ancestors, Antoine de l'Etang, a page to Queen Marie Antoinette...
, Duckworth is an independent British
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...
publisher. It was important in the development of English literature in the first half of the twentieth century, being the publisher of figures such as Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf
Adeline Virginia Woolf was an English author, essayist, publisher, and writer of short stories, regarded as one of the foremost modernist literary figures of the twentieth century....
(Gerald Duckworth's half-sister), W. H. Davies
W. H. Davies
William Henry Davies or W. H. Davies was a Welsh poet and writer. Davies spent a significant part of his life as a tramp or vagabond in the United States and United Kingdom, but became known as one of the most popular poets of his time...
, Anthony Powell
Anthony Powell
Anthony Dymoke Powell CH, CBE was an English novelist best known for his twelve-volume work A Dance to the Music of Time, published between 1951 and 1975....
, John Galsworthy
John Galsworthy
John Galsworthy OM was an English novelist and playwright. Notable works include The Forsyte Saga and its sequels, A Modern Comedy and End of the Chapter...
and D. H. Lawrence
D. H. Lawrence
David Herbert Richards Lawrence was an English novelist, poet, playwright, essayist, literary critic and painter who published as D. H. Lawrence. His collected works represent an extended reflection upon the dehumanising effects of modernity and industrialisation...
.
For many years the company operated out of its headquarters in Camden, north London, from a quaint building called 'The Old Piano Factory'. This had, as its name suggests, been a piano factory originally and was an almost perfectly circular edifice. Inside, along with a representative sample of the piano-maker's art, its meandering, dusty corridors and rooms all added to the charm and attracted some of the best, and most notable 'characters' of the writing community of the day. The main stock-in-trade of the company was the production and publication of large factual books for universities but it was a forward-looking company and kept its eye very much on market trends and opportunities.
In the mid-1980s the company dabbled in computer books designed to help home enthusiasts learn programming on such machines as the Atari 48, Sinclair Spectrum 48, Commodore 64 and the Amstrad CPC 64 and CPC 6128. Authors of these books included Kevin Bergin, and the brothers Mike and Pete Gerrard. Under the guiding hand of Duckworth manager Ray Davies, the company achieved a reasonable success with the books and moved on to produce a number of text-only adventure games. These roughly followed the style of the original 'Adventure' game by Crowther and Woods and put the player in a variety of fantasy settings where magic and wicked axe-throwing dwarves abounded. The dwarves of course were there to prevent player progress in the games but often the 'Printer's Devil', a publishing term for 'Murphy's Law, threw up other obstacles. One that was well remembered by the authors being that 'The Guffroms Won't Let You!', which is still being pondered to this day.
One fan of Pete Gerrard's book 'Exploring Adventures on the Commodore 64' managed to produce a couple of games himself after reading the book and these were also published by Duckworth. Although rather simple in design, easy to solve and hardly 'State-of-the-Art' even in those days, it did show people that they could learn enough from Gerrard's books to produce workable and playable games for themselves. Pete Gerrard now follows a rewarding career in the north of England designing gaming machines whilst brother Mike has been a successful author and travel writer for many years currently living in Arizona.
In 2003, the company suffered a financial collapse and was put into receivership. Its assets and goodwill were bought by Peter Mayer
Peter Mayer
Peter M. Mayer is an American independent publisher who is president of The Overlook Press/Peter Mayer Publishers, Inc., a Woodstock, New York - based publishing company he founded with his father in 1971. At the time of Overlook’s founding, Mayer was head of Avon Books, a large New York - based...
, a former chief executive of Penguin Books
Penguin Books
Penguin Books is a publisher founded in 1935 by Sir Allen Lane and V.K. Krishna Menon. Penguin revolutionised publishing in the 1930s through its high quality, inexpensive paperbacks, sold through Woolworths and other high street stores for sixpence. Penguin's success demonstrated that large...
, who already owned the The Overlook Press
The Overlook Press
The Overlook Press is an American independent publishing house based in New York. It was formed in 1971 by Peter Mayer, who had previously worked at Avon and Penguin Books, where he was CEO from 1978 to 1998. A general-interest publisher, Overlook has over one thousand titles in print, including...
of New York
New York
New York is a state in the Northeastern region of the United States. It is the nation's third most populous state. New York is bordered by New Jersey and Pennsylvania to the south, and by Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont to the east...
. The May 2007 edition of Publishing Trends reports that Duckworth's trade books are now to be published under a Duckworth/Overlook imprint.
The highly respected fictions editor Anna Haycraft, who was married to owner Colin Haycraft from 1956, was also known as a critically acclaimed novelist and Spectator
The Spectator
The Spectator is a weekly British magazine first published on 6 July 1828. It is currently owned by David and Frederick Barclay, who also owns The Daily Telegraph. Its principal subject areas are politics and culture...
columnist under the pen-name Alice Thomas Ellis). She died, at the aged of 72, in 2005.
Imprints
Duckworth has a number of imprints:- Duckworth General publishes literary and commercial fiction and non-fiction, including history, biography and memoir. , authors whose work is available under the Duckworth General imprint include John Bayley, Beryl BainbridgeBeryl BainbridgeDame Beryl Margaret Bainbridge, DBE was an English author from Liverpool. She was primarily known for her psychological novels, often set amongst the English working classes. Bainbridge won the Whitbread Awards prize for best novel in 1977 and 1996; she was nominated five times for the Booker...
, Robert LittellRobert LittellRobert Littell may refer to:* Robert Littell , New Jersey politician* Robert Littell , American writer...
, Joan Bakewell, Mary Warnock, William Vollmann and Helmut NewtonHelmut NewtonHelmut Newton, born Helmut Neustädter was a German-Australian photographer. He was a "prolific, widely imitated fashion photographer whose provocative, erotically charged black-and-white photos were a mainstay of Vogue and other publications."-Early life:Newton was born in Berlin, the son of Klara...
, though many of these have also published with other companies. The company claims recent successes with Clive Woodall’s One for Sorrow and J J Connolly’s Layer Cake, which reached number one and two respectively on the independent publisher bestseller list. - Duckworth Academic publishes scholarly monographs, specialising in history and related areas, including ArchaeologyArchaeologyArchaeology, or archeology , is the study of human society, primarily through the recovery and analysis of the material culture and environmental data that they have left behind, which includes artifacts, architecture, biofacts and cultural landscapes...
, ClassicsClassicsClassics is the branch of the Humanities comprising the languages, literature, philosophy, history, art, archaeology and other culture of the ancient Mediterranean world ; especially Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome during Classical Antiquity Classics (sometimes encompassing Classical Studies or...
, Ancient HistoryAncient historyAncient history is the study of the written past from the beginning of recorded human history to the Early Middle Ages. The span of recorded history is roughly 5,000 years, with Cuneiform script, the oldest discovered form of coherent writing, from the protoliterate period around the 30th century BC...
and Ancient PhilosophyAncient philosophyThis page lists some links to ancient philosophy. In Western philosophy, the spread of Christianity through the Roman Empire marked the ending of Hellenistic philosophy and ushered in the beginnings of Medieval philosophy, whereas in Eastern philosophy, the spread of Islam through the Arab Empire...
. It has an extensive backlist of titles published under the Duckworth and Bristol Classical Press imprints, and these include school and student texts in LatinLatinLatin is an Italic language originally spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. It, along with most European languages, is a descendant of the ancient Proto-Indo-European language. Although it is considered a dead language, a number of scholars and members of the Christian clergy speak it fluently, and...
, GreekGreek languageGreek is an independent branch of the Indo-European family of languages. Native to the southern Balkans, it has the longest documented history of any Indo-European language, spanning 34 centuries of written records. Its writing system has been the Greek alphabet for the majority of its history;...
, RussianRussian languageRussian is a Slavic language used primarily in Russia, Belarus, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. It is an unofficial but widely spoken language in Ukraine, Moldova, Latvia, Turkmenistan and Estonia and, to a lesser extent, the other countries that were once constituent republics...
, FrenchFrench languageFrench is a Romance language spoken as a first language in France, the Romandy region in Switzerland, Wallonia and Brussels in Belgium, Monaco, the regions of Quebec and Acadia in Canada, and by various communities elsewhere. Second-language speakers of French are distributed throughout many parts...
, GermanGerman languageGerman is a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an estimated 90 – 98 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and is the most widely-spoken first language in the European Union....
and Spanish languageSpanish languageSpanish , also known as Castilian , is a Romance language in the Ibero-Romance group that evolved from several languages and dialects in central-northern Iberia around the 9th century and gradually spread with the expansion of the Kingdom of Castile into central and southern Iberia during the...
and literature. Bloomsbury acquired the imprint in 2010; it continues under the Bristol Classical Press name - Ardis publishes Russian literature in translation.
- Duckworth has republished a number of editions first issued by the Nonesuch PressNonesuch PressNonesuch Press was a private press founded in 1922 in London by Francis Meynell, his wife Vera Mendel, and David Garnett.-History:Nonesuch Press's first book, a volume of John Donne's Love Poems was issued in May 1923. In total, the press produced more than 140 books. The press was at its peak in...
.
In 2006, Duckworth published An Incomplete History of the Art of the Funerary Violin by Rohan Kriwaczek
Rohan Kriwaczek
Rohan Kriwaczek is a British writer, composer and violinist of part-Austrian descent. A former student of Peter Maxwell Davies, Oliver Knussen and Judith Weir, and prolific creator of classical works, scores for theatre, TV, and radio, he has become best known as "England's foremost authority on...
; this book was subsequently reported to be a hoax, the funerary violin never having existed. In fact, however, Kriwaczek had all along designed the work as a pastiche and Duckworth profited handsomely from the media coverage.
Bloomsbury acuisition
In 2010, Duckworth's academic list was acquired by Bloomsbury Publishing.The 13-digit ISBN prefix for Duckworth is 97807156.
Archives of the company from 1936 are held by the University of London, and include editorial correspondence with authors.