Background
Guinzburg was born on December 13, 1899, in New York City, the son of Henry Aaron Guinzburg, a businessman and philanthropist, and Leonie Kleinert. The family was well-to-do and cultured.
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Harold Kleinert Guinzburg
Edit ProfileEducation
Guinzburg received his early education in New York and in 1917 entered Harvard University, from which he obtained a B. A. in 1921.
Career
After working briefly as a reporter in Bridgeport, Connecticut, and as a correspondent for the Boston Evening Transcript, Guinzburg studied law at Columbia Law School (1922-1926). He found the prospect of a legal career progressively less appealing and was influenced by a friend, Richard Leo Simon, to try publishing instead. In 1924 Guinzburg worked for Simon and Schuster; but he soon resolved, with what he later called "the over-optimism of youth, " to establish his own publishing firm. On March 1, 1925, Guinzburg and George S. Oppenheimer, who had been advertising manager at Alfred A. Knopf, founded the Viking Press, Inc. , with a capital of about $50, 000. They had planned to call their venture the Half Moon Press until Rockwell Kent designed a colophon for them that more closely resembled a Viking vessel than Henry Hudson's flagship. On August 1, 1925, Guinzburg and Oppenheimer secured a backlist of impressive titles by merging with the veteran publisher Benjamin W. Huebsch, whose authors included James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, and Sherwood Anderson. Huebsch became vice-president and editor in chief at Viking, while Guinzburg served as president and Oppenheimer as secretary and treasurer. The first Viking book list appeared in the fall of 1925 and included William Ellery Leonard's Two Lives, James Weldon Johnson's The Book of American Negro Spirituals, and translated works of Joseph Arthur de Gobineau and Johan August Strindberg. Through Huebsch's extensive contacts with European authors, the press acquired a substantial number of foreign works. Books such as Arnold Zweig's The Case of Sergeant Grischa (1928), Stefan Zweig's Marie Antoniette (1933), and Franz Werfel's The Song of Bernadette (1942) proved very popular with American readers. An English novel published by Viking, Sylvia Townsend Warner's Lolly Willowes (1926), was chosen by the newly established Book-of-the-Month Club as its initial offering. In November 1926 Guinzburg founded a rival book club, the Literary Guild of America, in collaboration with Samuel Craig. The Guild was patterned after the successful German book clubs that had developed after World War I to supply an impoverished public with cheap reading material. It proposed to cut production and distribution costs through the large-scale purchase of books at discount rates and their sale to club members through the mails. Carl Van Doren was appointed to select the Guild's offerings, and the club's first book - Heywood Broun and Margaret Leech's Anthony Comstock - was distributed in March 1927. Angry protests from publishers and booksellers caused Guinzburg to tone down his advertising the following year and to permit booksellers to handle Guild subscriptions on a commission basis. With these modifications the Guild prospered, reaching 41, 226 members with its twelfth selection. As Guinzburg began to have second thoughts concerning the potentially harmful effects of mass merchandising upon publishing standards, he gradually relinquished his interest in the Guild. In 1929 Nelson Doubleday bought 49 percent of the club's stock, and five years later Guinzburg sold the rest to him for $380, 000. The Literary Guild thereafter became an extension of Doubleday's publishing empire. Despite the depression of the 1930's, Viking expanded its publications by adding a juvenile department in 1933 under the direction of May Massee. Her discriminating taste in children's literature produced a distinguished juvenile list that included Munro Leaf's best seller The Story of Ferdinand (1936). During World War II Guinzburg worked for the Office of War Information (OWI), which he joined in January 1942. His duties involved the recruitment of personnel and the setting up of programs for OWI offices in friendly and neutral countries. In 1943 he became chief of the agency's Domestic Bureau of Publications and the following year he went to London as director of the London Publications Division. Under his direction almost half a million leaflets, books, magazines, and other informational materials were printed for distribution in the liberated areas of Europe. He returned to Viking in December 1944, but continued to serve as a general publishing consultant to the OWI until the end of the war. One enduring by-product of the wartime experience was the creation of Viking's Portable Library, a series of compact anthologies designed for servicemen. The first volume, Alexander Woollcott's As You Were (1943), proved so popular that the Viking editors continued to publish the selected writings of prominent authors in a "portable" format. In the 1950's Guinzburg authorized a paperback edition of many titles in the series. He also helped to launch Compass Books, paperback reprints of serious modern works taken largely from Viking backlists, in 1956. Each of these series sold well. A member of the American Civil Liberties Union, Guinzburg defended freedom of the press against the conformist pressures of the cold-war era. Guinzburg died on October 18, 1961, in New York City.
Achievements
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To insure the continued production of significant books in an age of mass marketing, Guinzburg advocated a more responsible publishing code, the expansion of the public library system, and the inculcation of sound reading habits in young people through more innovative teaching in schools and colleges.
Membership
Member of the American Civil Liberties Union, president of the American Book Publishers Council (1956-1958)
Connections
On December 24, 1923, Guinzburg married Alice Reizenstein; they had two children.
References
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Born
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Died
January 18, 1961 (aged 61) -
Nationality
American