A Life in Fifty Books A Publisher's Memoir

Starting with Homer's Odyssey and ending with works by the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins and the German historian Ernst Kantorowicz, Anthony Cheetham has selected fifty books as mileposts with which to map the course of his long and productive career. Many of these are titles that he himself published (Dune, The Thorn Birds, A Suitable Boy, Meetings with Remarkable Trees, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo); some are books he wished he had published (Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time); others are simply masterworks that left an indelible mark on him (The Lord of the Rings, War and Peace).
A Life in Fifty Books is an affectionate and revelatory account of a publishing life remarkable for its longevity, its entrepreneurial energy and for the breadth and catholicity of its output - which runs the gamut of seriousness from academically distinguished works of history, science and philosophy to Confessions of a Window Cleaner. Full of encounters with remarkable individuals as well as extraordinary books and embellished with beautiful photographs of book jackets from the 1950s to the present day, A Life in Fifty Books is an engagingly written survey of an industry which, in its author's well-chosen words, offers its practitioners '...a passport to roam across the entire spectrum of human experience, endeavour and belief'.