Ernest Hecht

Ernest Hecht
Born	1929 Czechoslovakia
Occupation	Publisher, Souvenir Press

Ernest Hecht OBE (born 1929) is a British publisher, producer, and philanthropist. He is the founder (in 1951), owner and managing director of Souvenir Press Ltd, the last remaining independently owned major publishing house in Great Britain. In 2003 he set up the Ernest Hecht Charitable Foundation. Described by The Bookseller as "one of a number of émigrés who changed the face of British publishing after the Second World War alongside George Weidenfeld, Paul Hamlyn and André Deutsch", Hecht was awarded an OBE in the Queen's Birthday Honours List for services to Publishing and Charity in June 2015. In August 2015, he was honoured by the President of Brazil with the Order of Rio Branco, which was presented to him at a ceremony by the Brazilian Ambassador in London.

Born in 1929 in Czechoslovakia, Ernest Hecht arrived in Britain as a Kindertransport child in 1939; he recalls: “On the train to England as a young man, I remember throwing up on one of the Gestapo. My mother must have been terrified but the man said it was ok because he had children of his own.” He was evacuated to Wiltshire, then to Minehead, Somerset. He read Economics and Commerce at Hull University College.

Hecht started Souvenir Press in 1951 in his bedroom at his parents' flat with a loan of £250, "a bed, a desk, a typewriter and a phone in the hall", his first book being "a paperback on cricket entitled Len Hutton: The World's greatest Batsman, written by a college friend and retailing at two shillings (ten pence)." He built the business up and has now successfully run the company for 60 years. Producing an eccentric list of titles ("His authors have ranged from Argentine revolutionary Che Guevara to comic chronicler of the British upper classes, PG Wodehouse, from Norwegian Kon Tiki adventurer Thor Heyerdahl to tap dance legend Fred Astaire...") from a notoriously untidy office in Bloomsbury, Hecht has been quoted as saying: "Anyone can create a high-class literary list of prestige titles. It's better to have a balanced list, comprising books that make money and those perhaps more worthy titles that don't. My adage is that a publisher’s first duty to an author is to remain solvent." He has also expressed the view that, as a publisher: "You have the freedom, and I'd be inclined to say, the duty, to publish books of a minority interest and titles whose time may not yet have arrived or ideas that challenge received wisdom."

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