GOLLANCZ

   UK publishing house, properly styled Victor Gollancz Ltd, famous (until its sale to the US company Houghton Mifflin in 1990) as one of the last family companies in UK publishing; in 1992 Houghton Mifflin sold the firm to the Cassell group of companies, where it became an imprint. Its early strength was in political polemic; its main postwar strengths were detective fiction and sf: from the early 1960s to the late 1980s it was the premier UK publisher of sf books in hardcover, both native and US. In the past half decade it has faced greater competition, but it is still (1995) one of the market leaders. Its earlier history as a publisher, withsome gripping stuff from the files, is told in Gollancz: The Story of a Publishing House: 1929-1978 (1978) by Sheila Hodges.Victor Gollancz(1893-1967), the firm's founder in 1928, had always been interested in the fantastic; though he was never to publish any sf by H.G. WELLS, one of his inaugural books was Wells's The Open Conspiracy (1928), and within a year he was publishing reissues of several works by M.P. SHIEL and a new novel by E.H. VISIAK. In the 1930s came Charles FORT's Lo! (1931), which flopped badly, the first translation of Franz KAFKA's Der Prozess (written 1914-15; 1925; trans Willa and Edwin Muir as The Trial 1937), sf novels byMurray Constantine (Katharine BURDEKIN), Andrew MARVELL, Joseph O'NEILL, R.C. SHERRIFF, Francis STUART and others, and five novels by Charles WILLIAMS. One of G's most valued authors was George ORWELL, but in 1944 Victor Gollancz turned down Animal Farm (1945), seeing its anti-Stalinism as inappropriate at a time when Russia, the UK's ally, was suffering during the war. Later he also rejected Orwell's NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR (1949).Though this was an unpromising beginning to the postwar period, Gdid publish a number of good sf titles in the 1950s, both non-genre and GENRE SF, the latter including a 1954 edition of Theodore STURGEON's MORETHAN HUMAN (1953); none, however, was labelled as "science fiction". This term and the sf list proper (20 or so books a year) were introduced by Hilary Rubinstein, Victor Gollancz's nephew, after Gollancz had in 1961published Kingsley AMIS's study of sf, New Maps of Hell (1960 US). Most of the early big names were US: Hal CLEMENT, Harry HARRISON, Robert A. HEINLEIN, Frederik POHL, Robert SHECKLEY, Clifford D. SIMAK and others.The first important UK writer to be added was J.G. BALLARD, with The Drowned World (1962). For the next two decades Gollancz's plain yellow jackets with black typography came to seem almost synonymous with UK-published hardcover sf. (Since the mid-1980s pictorial jackets havebeen phased in for most of the major sf and fantasy authors.) Other important UK writers joining Gollancz were Arthur C. CLARKE, Richard COWPER, Keith ROBERTS, Bob SHAW and Ian WATSON, with later additionsincluding Robert P. HOLDSTOCK, Paul J. MCAULEY, Phillip MANN and Terry PRATCHETT, several of whom made their debuts with Gollancz. Subsequent USauthors included Philip K. DICK, William GIBSON, Ursula K. LE GUIN and Robert SILVERBERG. The children's list included Peter DICKINSON. AfterRubinstein left in 1963, John Bush took over the list until the early 1980s, when Malcolm EDWARDS took over (spending larger sums on books than Gollancz had previously allowed), being followed by Richard Evans in 1989. Gollancz sf editors have normally held very senior positions in the company, sf providing a major contribution to the company's profit.

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