Parent company Random House Official website www.randomhouse.co.uk Founded 1855 | Country of origin United Kingdom Founder John Camden Hotten Parent organization Random House | |
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Chatto & Windus has been, since 1987, an imprint of Random House, publishers. It was originally an important publisher of books in London, founded in the Victorian era.
The firm developed out of the publishing business of John Camden Hotten, founded in 1855. After his death in 1873, it was sold to Hotten's junior partner Andrew Chatto (1841–1913) who took on the minor poet W. E. Windus as partner. Chatto & Windus published Mark Twain, W. S. Gilbert, Wilkie Collins, H. G. Wells, Richard Aldington, Frederick Rolfe (as Fr. Rolfe), Aldous Huxley, Samuel Beckett, the famous 'unfinished' novel Weir of Hermiston (1896) by Robert Louis Stevenson, and the first translation into English of Marcel Proust's novel À la recherche du temps perdu (Remembrance of Things Past, C. K. Scott-Moncrieff, 1922), amongst others.
In 1946, the company took over the running of the Hogarth Press, founded in 1917 by Leonard and Virginia Woolf. Active as an independent publishing house until 1969, when it merged with Jonathan Cape, it published broadly in the field of literature, including novels and poetry. It is not connected, except in the loosest historical fashion, with Pickering & Chatto Publishers.
Norah Smallwood was appointed to the board of Chatto & Windus when it became a limited company in 1953, and succeeded Ian Parsons as chairman and managing director in 1975, serving until her retirement in 1982.