Pantheon Books is a New York literary publisher founded in 1942 by Kurt and Helen Wolff, bought by Random House in 1961 and the first publisher of Art Spiegelman's Maus.
Pantheon Books is a publisher based in New York City, founded in 1942. We track 189 editions it published between 1945 and 2021, 115 of them first editions across 189 books. How Pantheon Books marked its first editions is set out below, with a checker for the year on your title page.
Pantheon Books is a New York literary publisher founded in 1942 by Kurt and Helen Wolff, who had fled fascist Europe, working with fellow émigré Jacques Schiffrin and partners including Kyrill Schabert; it is now an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group at Penguin Random House.
Kurt Wolff already had a long career behind him: he founded Kurt Wolff Verlag in Germany in 1913, one of the first houses to back Franz Kafka, and later ran Pantheon Casa Editrice in Italy, before the couple reached New York in 1941. Early Pantheon books included the Bollingen Series, which carried C. G. Jung's collected works into English with Jungian scholarship alongside, a complete English I Ching, and the American edition of Boris Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago.
Random House bought Pantheon in 1961, and André Schiffrin, Jacques's son, became its editorial head for nearly thirty years. His list included the English Tin Drum by Günter Grass and Michel Foucault's Madness and Civilization. He was pushed out in 1990 after refusing to shrink the list and its staff. Pantheon was an early home for the literary graphic novel, starting with Art Spiegelman's Maus: A Survivor's Tale in 1986 and later Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis (2003). Bertelsmann bought Random House in 1998, and the 2013 merger with Penguin brought Pantheon into Penguin Random House.
Holding a copy? The first edition checker shows Pantheon Books's practice for the year on your title page.
US practice (Pantheon is a New York house with no separate UK list)
US practice (Pantheon is a New York house with no separate UK list) - Up to 1964 Pantheon put no first edition statement on the copyright page. A first printing from these years is the copy with no later-printing notice. - From 1971 the copyright page of a first printing reads "First Edition". - From the late 1980s some first printings add a number line beside the "First Edition" statement, and on
We track 189 editions published by Pantheon Books, 115 of them first editions, across 189 books.
Every fact on this page was checked against the sources listed. Checked 3 November 2026. Reviewed by Harriet Ellis; read how we check facts.
