- The 1951 first UK edition of The Catcher in the Rye is bound in blue cloth lettered in silver, and its pictorial jacket was designed by Fritz Wegner.
Publisher
Hamish Hamilton
Hamish Hamilton is a London literary publisher founded by Jamie Hamilton in 1931, the British publisher of Chandler, Salinger and Capote, and now part of Penguin Random House.
- Editions tracked
- 377
- First editions
- 132
- Books
- 374
- Years
- 1923 to 2021
About Hamish Hamilton
Hamish Hamilton is a London literary publisher founded in 1931 by Jamie Hamilton, who gave the firm the Gaelic form of his own first name; it is now an imprint within Penguin General at Penguin Random House.
Hamilton, who was half Scottish and half American, set up in Bloomsbury and built a strong list of American writers for British readers, including Raymond Chandler, James Thurber, E. B. White, Truman Capote and J. D. Salinger, whose The Catcher in the Rye it published in Britain in 1951, the same year as the American first edition from Little, Brown. By the late 1940s its list also took in Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, Georges Simenon, Nancy Mitford, Terence Rattigan, A. J. P. Taylor and L. P. Hartley, and the firm was acting as London agent for the New York books of Harper & Brothers.
Hamilton sold the company to the Thomson Organisation in 1965, and Thomson sold it on to Penguin Books in 1986. Since the 2013 merger of Penguin and Random House it has been part of Penguin Random House. Penguin says the imprint publishes about 20 fiction and non-fiction titles a year, by writers such as Zadie Smith, Arundhati Roy, W. G. Sebald and Han Kang, and in 2008 it launched the online magazine Five Dials.
Identification
How to identify Hamish Hamilton first editions
Authors
Books
Published by Hamish Hamilton
Spot the edition: Dust jacket, front flap: Printed price on the front flap: 8s. 6d. net (first issue jacket)
Frequently asked questions
How do I identify a Hamish Hamilton first edition?
- The 1951 first UK edition of The Catcher in the Rye is bound in blue cloth lettered in silver, and its pictorial jacket was designed by Fritz Wegner.
How many Hamish Hamilton books does MyVolumes track?
We track 377 editions published by Hamish Hamilton, 132 of them first editions, across 374 books.
Where these facts come from
- Hamish Hamilton, Wikipedia (en.wikipedia.org)
- Hamish Hamilton, Penguin Books UK (penguin.co.uk)
- First Editions of Today and How to Tell Them (3rd edn), H. S. Boutell, Internet Archive, 1949 (archive.org)
- The Catcher in the Rye, First UK Edition (1951), Rare Books Ireland (rarebooks.ie)
- Salinger, J. D. The Catcher in the Rye, Ashton Rare Books (ashtonrarebooks.com)
- J D Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye, First UK Edition, 1951, John Atkinson Books (johnatkinsonbooks.co.uk)
Every fact on this page was checked against the sources listed. Checked 17 October 2026. Reviewed by Harriet Ellis; read how we check facts.