Our History

Twenty-seven-year-old Gerald Duckworth founds his publishing imprint, acquiring 3 Henrietta Street, Covent Garden as the office. He is joined shortly after by literary advisor Edward Garnett and sales manager Jonathan Cape, among others.

D.H. Lawrence writes of his royalties: ‘this morning Duckworth sent me £50 in notes – the angel! We are both bursting with joy’. The following year Duckworth publishes his Sons and Lovers.

Colin Haycraft (with Tim Simon, who died two years later) acquires control of Duckworth. Haycraft takes to communicating with authors on a postcard featuring a duck upside down in a pond. Oliver Sacks later wrote of Haycraft’s editing: ‘I never felt [Colin] as intrusive; I felt rather, that I had been guided to myself, to defining more exactly, what I needed and wanted to say.’

Alfred Hitchock films Frenzy in Duckworth’s office at 3 Henrietta Street. Hitchcock installs himself in an open white Rolls-Royce in the street below to direct scenes.

Duckworth sells 3 Henrietta Street to move to the Old Piano Factory in Camden. A Hampstead bookseller recalled life in the new office: ‘Beryl Bainbridge was sitting scribbling away, Mervyn was reading, close to a piano. A packer was packing. Colin was looking learned as always… I said, “Give us a tune, Mervyn.” Mervyn leaped to the piano, Beryl joined him and they played and sang a Victorian ballad.’

Anna Haycraft joins the board, and builds a fiction list of female writers, publishing the work of Beryl Bainbridge, as well as her own novels as Alice Thomas Ellis.

Duckworth acquires the academic Bristol Classical Press, though only after Duckworth’s offer is found to have been languishing in Haycraft’s out-tray for a week.

On its 100th anniversary, the firm moves to new offices at Frith Street, Soho.

Duckworth launches a venture of book-to-film projects, named Duckworth Literary Editions. To mark the new venture and anniversary, a launch party, ‘The Night of the Duck’, is held at a cost of £100,000.

After Duckworth Literary Editions fails to take off, former Penguin CEO Peter Mayer buys Duckworth out of the brink of collapse, and moves operations first to Cowcross Street, Farringdon, then to Calvin Street, Shoreditch. The annual Duckworth party becomes a fixture again on the publishing scene.

Peter Mayer dies, and Duckworth merges with Farrago Books, launched by Pete Duncan, to form Duckworth Books. The firm moves to new offices in Richmond-upon-Thames – close to Hogarth House where Virginia Woolf once set up her own publishing imprint, having had her earliest books published by Gerald Duckworth.

Duckworth celebrates its 125th anniversary with reissues of six contemporary classics showcasing the list, and a birthday party with a marginally more prudent budget than the 100th.

September becomes an imprint of the Duckworth Books family.