Weidenfeld & Nicolson is a London publisher founded in 1948 or 1949 by George Weidenfeld and Nigel Nicolson; it issued the first UK Lolita in 1959 and is now part of Orion and Hachette.
Weidenfeld and Nicolson is a publisher active from 1953. We track 23 editions it published between 1953 and 2006, 16 of them first editions across 23 books. How Weidenfeld & Nicolson marked its first editions is set out below, with a checker for the year on your title page.
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.
Holding a copy? The first edition checker shows Weidenfeld and Nicolson's practice for the year on your title page.
Identification
How to identify Weidenfeld and Nicolson first editions
What to look for
Weidenfeld and Nicolson is the same house as Weidenfeld & Nicolson; the marks below are its.
A Weidenfeld & Nicolson first edition carries either a "First published in (year)" line on the copyright page or no edition statement at all. Later printings are noted on the copyright page.
How to read it
With or without a "First published" line, a first edition has no reprint or later impression line on the copyright page.
A copy with no edition statement can still be a first edition: the firm issued some firsts with none.
