Calder Publishing - History

History

John Calder started his publishing house in 1949 when manuscripts were plentiful and many books that were in demand were out of print - in the immediate post-war years paper was scarce and severely rationed.

During the 1950s he built up a list of translated classics, which included the works of Chekhov, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Goethe and Zola among others. Calder then began to publish American titles. As a result of Senator Joe McCarthy's "witch-hunt" he was able to acquire significant American authors as well as books on issues of civil liberty that mainstream publishers in New York were afraid to keep on their lists. This led to the development of close ties with those smaller American firms who resisted the McCarthyite pressure.

By the late 1950s, Calder was publishing a group of new writers who would change the face of twentieth-century literature. One of these was Samuel Beckett; of whom Calder published all his novels, poetry, criticism, and some of his plays. Others became synonymous with the school of the "nouveau roman" or "new novel". These included Alain Robbe-Grillet, Marguerite Duras, Claude Simon, Nathalie Sarraute and Robert Pinget. Other European novelists, playwrights and poets included Heinrich Böll, Dino Buzzati, Eugène Ionesco, Fernando Arrabal, René de Obaldia, Peter Weiss and Ivo Andric. Calder was soon launching new experimental British writers such as Ann Quin, Alan Burns, Eva Tucker and R.C. Kennedy - who, influenced by their European counterparts, became part of the avant-garde of the early 1960s.

From his experience of authors' tours, John Calder saw that readers much enjoyed hearing authors air their ideas in public - often in heated debate. He persuaded the Edinburgh Festival to stage large literary conferences - the first of their kind - which in 1962 and 1963 were immensely successful. They attracted many of the world's leading writers as well as others whose names were not yet familiar to the public.