Hamish Hamilton

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Hamish Hamilton is a British book publisher, founded eponymously by the half-Scot half-American Jamie Hamilton (Hamish is the Celtic form). Hamilton was an oarsman with Thames Rowing Club and Olympic Silver medallist (with the British eight at the Amsterdam Olympics, 1928), a language student at Cambridge and an employee of the book department at Harrod's before founding his own publishing house in the 1930s.

Hamish Hamilton originally specialized in fiction, and was responsible for publishing a number of American authors in the United Kingdom - including J.D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye. Hamish Hamilton Law and Hamish Hamilton Medical were started in 1939 but closed during the war. Hamish Hamilton was established in Bloomsbury, London and went on to publish a large number of promising British and American authors, a large number of whom were personal friends and acquaintances of Jamie Hamilton.

Jamie Hamilton sold the firm to the Thomson Organisation in 1965, who resold it to Penguin Books in 1986.