Gallimard

About Gallimard

Gallimard is the Paris publishing house founded in 1911 by Gaston Gallimard with André Gide and Jean Schlumberger as the book arm of the Nouvelle Revue Française, and is one of France's leading literary publishers.

The editors of the NRF decided to start the house in December 1910, choosing Gallimard as business partner, and its first books appeared in June 1911 under the name Éditions de la Nouvelle Revue Française. It became Librairie Gallimard in 1919 and later took the name Éditions Gallimard. The second volume of Proust's In Search of Lost Time, À l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs, became the first book the house published to win the Prix Goncourt. In 1933 Gallimard acquired the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, the series of French classics on thin paper, which first appeared in 1931.

Gallimard first published many key works of twentieth-century French writing, among them Sartre's La Nausée (1938), Camus's L'Étranger (June 1942) and Simone de Beauvoir's Le Deuxième Sexe (1949). The crime series Série noire followed after the Second World War, and the Folio paperback line began in the early 1970s.

The family has kept control. Antoine Gallimard, Gaston's grandson, became managing director in 1988, and the family holding company raised its stake to 98 per cent in 2003. Gallimard bought the Flammarion group in 2012, and its parent, Groupe Madrigall, is now the third-largest publishing group in France.