Glenn Thompson (publisher)
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Glenn Thompson, American book publisher and activist, was born September 24, 1940, in New York City and was raised in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn. Thompson's mother died when he was eleven and shortly thereafter his father was put in jail, leaving Glenn and his younger brother, Denis, mostly alone. A teacher discovered that Glenn was illiterate and taught him to read and write. He left school when he was fourteen, but continued to educate himself by reading voraciously. He signed on to work on a freighter when he was twenty, thus buying passage to North Africa. For the next few years, Glenn travelled around North Africa, Europe, the Middle East, and South Asia. He worked for two years on an Israeli kibbutz. Arriving in London in 1968, Thompson leveraged his street-kid background and African-American heritage to get legal employment as a social worker in the East London borough of Hackney. In 1970, he began a community-based bookshop and publishing cooperative called Centerprise, which is still in operation. The first work published by Centerprise was a book of poetry by a twelve-year-old boy named Vivian Usherwood. With his first wife Margaret Goseley, and like-minded friends John Berger, Lisa Appignanesi, Richard Appignanesi, Arnold Wesker and Chris Searle, Thompson founded the Writers and Readers Cooperative to publish books. Until the mid-1980s, the Cooperative also operated a London bookshop at 144 Camden High Street. Writers and Readers Cooperative's most successful and long-lived publishing venture was the Beginner series of documentary comic books on complex topics, starting with the first title, Castro for Beginners and covering subjects from Freud and Marx to Elvis and DNA. A rift in the Cooperative led to one of the members issuing the U.S. rights to several of the Beginners series to Pantheon Books. Thompson moved to New York City in the early 1980s to establish a legal foothold and prevent any further pirating of titles. For the balance of his life, Glenn moved back and forth between New York City and London. In New York, he expanded his company's list, publishing young poets (Harlem River Press) and children's books (Black Butterfly Children's Books). Thompson died of cancer in London on September 7, 2001.
