Éditions Gallimard

Gallimard wishes to be worthy of the literary heritage and values which presided over its creation, while at the same time preserving its financial and commercial independence, and developing original market strategies. This policy has overseen the gradual reinforcement of the Gallimard Group, a diversified and balanced structure ensuring that dynamic growth and development remain synonymous with the Gallimard brand-name. Gaston Gallimard is exonerated of charges of collaborating with the Nazis during the occupation of France. The Gallimard family wins control of 61 percent of the company's stock. Éditions Gallimard is the third-largest publishing group in France. It consists of a number of imprints, including Éditions de la Pléiade, NRF, Denoël, Mercure de France, the Du Monde Entier imprint of foreign authors, and its paperback imprint Folio. The company publishes approximately 750 new titles every year. Gallimard's backlist catalogue of 17,000 titles includes most of the great French and international authors of the twentieth century, including Marcel Proust, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Jean Genet, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Franz Kafka, James Joyce, Jack Kerouac, Philip Roth, Sigmund Freud, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Michel Foucault. Gallimard's reputation also rests on the Pléiade collection of classic authors and Gallimard-Jeunesse, its renowned children's book division. Gallimard distributes its books through La Sodis, its distribution company. Gallimard also operates a handful of bookstores, including Schoenhof's Foreign Bookstore in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Éditions Gallimard emerged from a marriage of convenience of Gaston Gallimard and the Nouvelle Revue Française ( NRF ), a leading French avant-garde literary journal. In December 1910, the magazine's editors, comprised largely of modernist writers such as André Gide, decided to found a book-publishing company. Needing a business manager, they turned to thirty-year old Gaston Gallimard, son of a wealthy patron of leading Impressionist painters. Gallimard's father also possessed large collection of rare first editions and used his wealth to finance the printing of deluxe editions, sometimes limited to as few as two or three copies. Gaston inherited his father's interests. By the time he was twenty years old, his life centered on fine art, rare books, the Parisian theater, gourmet restaurants, beautiful women, and his friends. Gaston was precisely the kind of person the NRF was looking for: wealthy enough to make a significant monetary investment in the new firm, with both good business instincts and refined tastes in literature, who would put quality ahead of short-term profits; who could provide leadership but was flexible enough to consider the opinions of NRF editors. Moreover, most the NRF 's editors already knew him. Growing bored of his shiftless playboy life, Gallimard jumped at the opportunity. With FRF 20,000 borrowed from an uncle, he became a partner in the new publishing house Les Éditions de la NRF. Gallimard had sole responsibility for managing the publishing house. He threw himself into the job, working from pre-dawn until early evening. In June 1911, the publisher's first three books were issued: Gide's Isabelle , Paul Claudel's L'otage , and Charles-Louis Philippe's La mere et l'enfant . Others by Saint-John Perse, Gide, Claudel, and Dostoyevsky expanded the list further in 1912. Off to a healthy start, Les Éditions de la NRF moved from a storefront and Gallimard's bedroom to larger offices where they would remain until 1921. The house was determined to position itself at the cutting edge of French letters. Despite its intentions, however, it nearly lost one of the greatest writers of the 20th century. In 1913, Gaston Gallimard solicited two 550-page manuscripts by a little-known writer named Marcel Proust. The NRF editors, especially Gide, rejected the work as overly long and overly traditional. Proust