Records of Chatto & Windus Ltd

CW

1860s-1990s

The firm that became Chatto & Windus in 1873 originated in the 1850s from the bookselling business of John Camden Hotten. On Hotten’s death, his employee Andrew Chatto acquired the business with a sleeping partner, W.E. Windus. In 1946 it acquired The Hogarth Press, which had been establoished by in 1917 by Virginia and Leonoard Woolf . In 1969 Chatto & Windus merged with Jonathan Cape, with all three imprints being retained, as was The Bodley Head when it joined the firm in 1973. In 1987 the group was purchased by Random House. English and American literature were the strengths of the list. The firm published many celebrated authors – Robert Louis Stevenson, Marcel Proust, Laurie Lee, Christopher Isherwood, Aldous Huxley, Sigmund Freud and Iris Murdoch among them. Cecil Day-Lewis, Poet Laureate, was editorial director in the 1960s. Source: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.co.uk/publishers/vintage/chatto-windus/

The collection consists of correspondence files 1915-1990s, out letter books 1873-1990s, author’s accounts 1872-1945, stock books1862-1995, profit and loss ledgers 1920-1947, reader’s reports 1915-1990s, newspaper cutting albums of reviews1909-1965, newspaper cutting albums of advertisements 1914-1960; 1963-1966, artwork files including some original artwork1940s-1990s, and author publicity photographs 1940s-1980s. The bulk of early correspondence files were lost when they were sent for salvage in 1915 to help with the war effort. Some material comes from the subsidiary firms John Camden Hotten, Saunders Otley & Co., Sussex University Press, and Christopher’s.

926 boxes, 33 oversized boxes, 1255 bound volumes (363 linear metres)

Prior permission from Random House is required. Please contact Special Collections for further information.

MS 5799/3/9/1/2, MS 5799/3/9/1/1, MS 5799/3/9/1, MS 5799/3/9/1/3, MS 5799/3/9/1/4, MS 5799/3/9/1/5, MS 5799/3/9/3, MS 5799/3/9/2