#knopf 100

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We can’t say thank you enough to all of the Indies who helped us celebrate our 100th anniversary. Pictured here are just a few of the amazing displays you all created. Here’s to 100 more! 

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Willa Cather and Alfred Knopf

by editor Ann Close

    (from the jacket of The Selected Letters of Willa Cather)

As we close out this year-long celebration of our 100th anniversary, Knopf editor Ann Close shares one more story from our imprint’s history. Thank you for following along throughout the Knopf 100!

     A lot has changed in publishing as we read somewhere almost every day, but a lot has stayed the same, in particular the relationship between publisher or editor and writer. Writers still want undivided and instantaneous attention for their work (and themselves), and a wise publisher/editor knows exactly how to give it.

     Willa Cather came to Knopf a mere six years after its founding when she had already published three of her best known novels—O Pioneers, The Song of the Lark, and My Antonia—and she came because Alfred Knopf offered to republish a book of stories, enriching it with a few new ones, when her previous publisher showed no interest, and also because she didn’t think that house was promoting her books as well as Knopf promoted his list. And she might have been right. The first novel of hers he published was “One of Ours,” which won the Pulitzer Prize, a first for both Willa Cather and the new Knopf Publishers.

     There were other reasons too, and Cather writes about one of them in a letter to her brother Roscoe on January 8, 1940.  She starts off by saying, “It’s hard for me to tell you much about the realities of my life. But a writer’s relations to his or her publisher is a very vital fact—means happiness or constant anxiety.” And goes on to say about Alfred Knopf:  

        “Somewhere I still have a letter from him, dated ‘Christmas morning, 4 o’clock.’ I had been at his house for a Christmas Eve party (awful English, excuse!) and I took with me the ms. of  ‘A Lost Lady’ thinking he might read it over the holiday.   He sat up after the party that night and read it, and wrote me that night at 4 a.m. The letter reached me by special messenger on Christmas morning. So it began:

                                                                            Christmas morning,

                                                                             four oclock.

           My dear Miss Cather.

           I think you are a very great writer.-------

   The story struck him hard; and he was there at the bat when I pitched him a ball.  (This figure is bad baseball, I know, but it expresses the relation between a writer and a live publisher, who isn’t afraid.) …

    Please send Alfred Knopf’s two letters back to me. I thought you might like to see them.”

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Thank you Hickory Stick Bookshop in Connecticut for helping us celebrate the #Knopf100!

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It's September (ok, ok we're 2 days late)! Celebrate the #Knopf100 by downloading our monthly poster and calendar here. 

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#Blessed to have Indie bookstore partners like Elliott Bay Book Company. Thanks for helping us celebrate our big birthday.

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A very happy publication day to Carolina De Robertis, Al Hirschfeld, and Roger Hobbs!

The Gods of Tango by Carolina De Robertis

February 1913: seventeen-year-old Leda, clutching a suitcase and her father’s cherished violin, leaves her small Italian village for a new home (and husband) halfway across the world in Argentina. Upon her arrival in Buenos Aires, Leda is shocked to find that her bridegroom has been killed. Unable to fathom the idea of returning home, she remains in this unfamiliar city, living in a commune, without friends or family, on the brink of destitution. She finally acts on a passion she has kept secret for years: mastering the violin. Leda is seduced by the music that underscores life in the city: tango, born from lower-class immigrant voices, now the illicit, scandalous dance of brothels and cabarets. Leda knows, however, that she can never play in public as a woman, so she cuts off her hair, binds her breasts, and, as a young man, joins a troupe of musicians bent on bringing tango into the salons of high society. As time progresses, the lines between Leda and her disguise will begin to blur, and feelings that she has long kept suppressed will reveal themselves, jeopardizing not only her music career but her life itself.

The Hirschfeld Century: Portrait of an Artist and His Age by Al Hirschfeld

I am down to a pencil, a pen, and a bottle of ink. I hope one day to eliminate the pencil. Al Hirschfeld redefined caricature and exemplified Broadway and Hollywood, enchanting generations with his mastery of line. His art appeared in every major publication during nine decades of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, as well as on numerous book, record, and program covers; film posters and publicity art; and on fifteen U.S. postage stamps.

Vanishing Games by Roger Hobbs

The gritty, riveting, highly anticipated sequel to the national (and international) best seller Ghostman, by the critically acclaimed and award-winning Roger Hobbs.

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Published on this day...March 23rd.

Selected Poems of Langston Hughes, 1959

The Keepers of the House, Shirley Ann Grau, 1964

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize

Friend of My Youth, Alice Munro, 1990

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Knopf legends make for great calendars. Download it now!