Weidenfeld and Nicolson

About Weidenfeld and Nicolson

Weidenfeld & Nicolson is a London publisher founded in the late 1940s by George Weidenfeld and Nigel Nicolson, and it is now an imprint of the Orion Publishing Group within Hachette.

Sources differ on the founding year: Wikipedia's history of the firm gives 1949, while the Princeton archive and Weidenfeld's biography give 1948. Weidenfeld was a refugee from Vienna who became a British citizen in 1947; Nicolson was the son of Harold Nicolson and Vita Sackville-West. Early books included Isaiah Berlin's The Hedgehog and the Fox (1953). In 1959 the firm published the first British edition of Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita and it later issued James D. Watson's The Double Helix (1968) and Nicolson's own Portrait of a Marriage (1973). Authors whose papers sit in the firm's archive include Saul Bellow, Margaret Drabble, Norman Mailer and Edna O'Brien.

Weidenfeld bought the American house Grove Press in 1985 and was made a life peer in 1976. Weidenfeld sold the British company to the newly formed Orion Publishing Group in 1991, where it became the core of Orion's list, and Orion itself was acquired by Hachette Livre in 1998. The firm's archive went to Princeton University Library in 2018.