Grant Richards papers, 1897-1930s

Franklin Thomas Grant Richards (1872-1948) was a British publisher and author. The son of Franklin Thomas Richards, A Fellow of Trinity College, Oxford, and a nephew of the author Grant Allen, Richards started his first publishing house in 1897 in Covent Garden. In 1901, Richards launched the The World's Classics series of paperbacks, which is still published today by Oxford University Press as Oxford World's Classics. Because of high demand for these books, the publishing house went into debt and fell out of business in 1905. Richards continued to work in publishing and opened another firm, E. Grant Richards (for his first wife, Elisina). Richards also published works under Grant Richards Ltd., and--when the firm went bankrupt again in 1926--under Richards Press.

Richards published authors including George Bernard Shaw, A. E. Housman, Samuel Butler, and James Joyce. He also authored nine novels and two autobiographies of his own. Richards's published works include Caviare (1912), Valentine (1913), Bittersweet (1915), Double Life: A Novel (1920), Every Wife: An Amusement (1924), Fair Exchange (1927), Memories of a Misspent Youth, 1872-1896 (1932), and Author Hunting, by an Old Literary Sportsman; Memories of Years Spent Mainly in Publishing, 1897-1925 (1934).

His first marriage to Elisina Palamidessi de Castelvecchio (a descendant of Louis Napoleon Bonaparte) ended in divorce in 1914, and he remarried to Maria Magdalena de Csanady in 1915. Richards died in Monaco in 1948.

Sources

Jaillant, Lise. "Grant Richards." modernistarchives.com.

"Mr. Grant Richards," The Times (London), 25 February 1948, Issue 51004, p. 7.