Gerald Duckworth and Company
| Parent company | The Overlook Press |
|---|---|
| Founded | 1898 |
| Founder | Gerald Duckworth |
| Country of origin |
 United Kingdom
|
| Headquarters location | London |
| Publication types | Books |
| Official website | www |
Duckworth Overlook, originally Gerald Duckworth and Company, founded in 1898 by Gerald Duckworth, is an independent British publisher. It was important in the development of English literature in the first half of the twentieth century, when it published such writers as Virginia Woolf (Gerald Duckworth's half-sister), W. H. Davies, Anthony Powell, John Galsworthy and D. H. Lawrence. It continues to be highly respected and successful within the publishing industry.
For many years the company operated from a headquarters at Camden, North London, in a building called 'The Old Piano Factory'. This was originally a piano factory and its charm - as well as the keen eye of the firm's long-standing chairman Colin Haycraft, together with his wife Anna (who was fiction editor, and also eventually a novelist in her own right under the pen name Alice Thomas Ellis) - attracted some of the best and most notable 'characters' of the writing community of the day. The main stock-in-trade was the production and publication of academic books for universities. It was also a forward-looking company that kept its eye on market trends and opportunities, publishing a variety of books by some of the most popular authors of the twentieth century. It widened its range when it entered the world of publishing computing books at the start of the microcomputer revolution including Music and Sound Effects on the Commodore 64 by William Turner and Alf Vella.
In 2003 the company suffered a financial collapse and was put into receivership. Its assets were bought by Peter Mayer, a former chief executive of Penguin Books, who already owned The Overlook Press of New York City. The May 2007 edition of Publishing Trends reported that Duckworth's trade books were then published under the Duckworth/Overlook imprint. In 2012 Duckworth in London and Overlook in New York continue to work together to produce and promote their publications.
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Wikipedia