Chatto & Windus

About Chatto & Windus

Chatto & Windus is a London literary publisher whose history begins in 1855, when John Camden Hotten started the business; it is now an imprint of Vintage at Penguin Random House and is described by Penguin as its oldest continuous imprint.

When Hotten died in 1873, his junior partner Andrew Chatto bought the firm and brought in the poet William Edward Windus as partner, which gave the house its lasting name. The Victorian list included Mark Twain, Wilkie Collins and W. S. Gilbert, and in 1896 the firm issued Robert Louis Stevenson's unfinished novel Weir of Hermiston.

In the twentieth century Chatto published H. G. Wells, Wyndham Lewis, Samuel Beckett and Aldous Huxley, whose Brave New World it first published in February 1932. In 1922 it began the first English translation of Proust, by C. K. Scott Moncrieff, under the title Remembrance of Things Past. From 1946 it took over the running of the Hogarth Press, founded by Leonard and Virginia Woolf in 1917, and it became a limited company in 1953.

Chatto lost its independence in 1969 through a merger with Jonathan Cape. Norah Smallwood was chairman and managing director from 1975 to 1982. In 1987 Random House bought the group, including Chatto, Cape and Virago, and after the 2013 merger of Penguin and Random House the imprint became part of Penguin Random House, where it sits within Vintage.

How to spot a Chatto & Windus first edition

• Chatto & Windus did not use a special mark for first editions: it told H. S. Boutell so in its replies to his surveys of publishers' practice.