Writers and Readers Limited
1992
-
2001
- 1
- Country:
- United Kingdom
- Indicia / Colophon Publishers:
- 1
- Brand Groups:
- 1
- Brand Emblems in Use:
- 2
- Total Number of Series:
- 1
- Total Number of Issues:
- 1
- Show Covers by Month:
- using on-sale date or using publication date
- Show Issues by Month:
- using on-sale date or using publication date
- Creator Checklist:
- via linked story records
- Notes:
- The company began as Writers and Readers Publishing Cooperative, a London, England-based publisher founded in 1974 by Glenn Thompson, his then-wife Sian Williams, Richard Appignanesi, Lisa Appignanesi, John Berger, Arnold Wesker, and Chris Searle, A publishing cooperative, the founders of Writers and Readers shared the work and the profits (see https://www.comics.org/publisher/8098/).
In the early 1980s questions of control arose after some members of the cooperative sold U.S. rights to part of the For Beginners series to Pantheon Books. The Cooperative officially disbanded in 1984.
Following this rift, in 1987 Thompson took over as sole publisher and moved back to his hometown of New York City to establish a legal foothold and prevent any further unauthorized distributing of titles. Based in Harlem, the company was known as Writers and Readers Publishing, Inc (https://www.comics.org/publisher/6143/). The London-based company, formally established in 1992, was known as Writers and Readers Limited. For years, Thompson spent his time traveling between England and New York to manage the two companies.
Richard Appignanesi, who had been the first editor in London for the series and had also written several of the titles, co-created the new publisher Icon Books, under whose imprint he republished several of the For Beginners titles and continued to publish and expand a British version of the series called Introducing. Meanwhile, the New York-based Writers and Readers continued the For Beginners series, in several cases commissioning new authors to create replacement books for those being published in Britain. This led to a number of examples where the two ranges were publishing two different books on the same subject.
Thompson died of cancer in London on September 7, 2001; by the time of his death, the company had published more than forty For Beginners titles.
Several years after Thompson died, investors decided to buy the rights to the titles, creating For Beginners, LLC (https://www.comics.org/publisher/11779/). - Keywords
- documentary comics; England; For Beginners; London; non-fiction comics; trade paperbacks
Editing
| Series | Year | Issues | Covers | Published |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| For Beginners [b] | 1992 | 1 issues (0 indexed) | Add | [June] 1986 |
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