About the Book:

In November 1966, by way of Mexico City, Eton College, Balliol College, Oxford, and a Norwegian raspberry farm, Anthony Cheetham entered the doors of a publishing company for the first time to begin work as a junior editor. Fifty-eight years later he could look back on a career in which he had shaped the landscape of post-war British publishing to a significant degree, having established such prominent and notably successful companies as Century, Orion, Quercus and Head of Zeus, and launched imprints – from Abacus in 1973 to Zephyr in 2017 – that continue to flourish in the third decade of the twenty-first century.

Starting with Homer’s Odyssey and ending with works by the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins and the German historian Ernst Kantorowicz, Anthony Cheetham has selected fifty books as mileposts with which to map the course of his long and productive career. Many of these are titles that he himself published (Dune, The Thorn Birds, A Suitable Boy, Meetings with Remarkable Trees, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo); some are books he wished he had published (Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time); others are simply masterworks that left an indelible mark on him (The Lord of the Rings, War and Peace). A Life in Fifty Books is an affectionate and revelatory account of a publishing life remarkable for its longevity, its entrepreneurial energy and for the breadth and catholicity of its output – which runs the gamut of seriousness from academically distinguished works of history, science and philosophy to Confessions of a Window Cleaner.

About the Author:

Anthony Cheetham read history at Balliol College, Oxford. A founder of Century, Abacus, Orion and Quercus, he has worked in the publishing industry for more than fifty years. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.