Random House

About Random House

Random House is an American general trade publisher founded in New York in 1927 by Bennett Cerf and Donald Klopfer, and today an imprint and publishing group within Penguin Random House.

Cerf and Klopfer had bought the Modern Library reprint series in 1925 and started Random House to publish other books "at random" alongside it. In 1934 it published the first authorised English-language edition of James Joyce's Ulysses, and in 1936 it bought the publisher Smith and Haas. It added Alfred A. Knopf in 1960 and Pantheon in 1961.

Random House went public in 1959 and was bought by RCA in 1965, Advance Publications in 1980 and Bertelsmann in 1998. In 2013 it merged with Penguin to form Penguin Random House, wholly owned by Bertelsmann since 2020 and based at 1745 Broadway, Manhattan.

Books it first published include Truman Capote's Breakfast at Tiffany's (October 1958, with three other stories), Maya Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (February 1969) and Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian (April 1985).

How to identify Random House first editions

• Random House marks the first printing with the words "First Edition" on the copyright page; the firm stated this policy in 1947.
• On later books the number row on a first printing often starts at 2 rather than 1, with "First Edition" standing in for the missing 1 (for example "First Edition / 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9"); a row starting at 2 without the statement is a second printing.
• Book club editions are a common trap: their jackets usually carry no price on the front flap, so a priced jacket is one of the first things to check.

US first editions

• From at least the 1940s a Random House trade first printing says "First Edition" on the copyright page.
• Later Random House books add a number row that stops at 2 instead of 1, with the "First Edition" statement standing in for the 1. Later printings lose the statement, so a row starting at 2 with no statement is a second printing.
• The Stephen King and Peter Straub novel Black House (2001) is an example: its first printing has a first edition statement above the row 2 4 6 8 9 7 5 3.
• Book-of-the-Month Club copies are usually the same size and quality as the trade edition, so size is no guide. Look instead for a jacket with no price on the front flap and a small blind stamp (a dot, circle or square) low on the rear board. BOMC printed prices on some jackets in the 1970s, but those copies still carry the blind stamp.
• A rear-board mark is not always a club sign: a few very large printings were shared between printing plants, each of which embossed its own mark.