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Blanche Knopf

Fellows Find: National identity’s influence on Elizabeth Bowen’s imagination

February 22, 2016 - Eibhear Walshe

Elizabeth Bowen. Unknown photographer, May 1953.

Eibhear Walshe, a Senior Lecturer in the School of English at University College Cork, came to the Ransom Center in 2014 to utilize the collection of Irish novelist Elizabeth Bowen. Dr. Walshe’s publications include Kate O’Brien: A Writing Life (2006), Cissie’s Abattoir (2009), Oscar’s Shadow (2011),  and The Diary of Mary Travers (2014). In addition, Walshe has edited a selection of publications including Elizabeth Bowen Remembered (1999), The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing: Volume 4 (2002), and Elizabeth Bowen: Visions and Revisions (2008). His research was supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Research Fellowship Endowment as part of the Ransom Center’s fellowship program. [Read more…] about Fellows Find: National identity’s influence on Elizabeth Bowen’s imagination

Filed Under: Authors, Books + Manuscripts, Research + Teaching Tagged With: Blanche Knopf, Curtis Brown, Elizabeth Bowen, Fellowships

Fellows Find: Scholar explores connections between Langston Hughes and other black writers around the globe

April 26, 2012 - Shane Graham

Cover of Langston Hughes's "Not Without Laughter," published by Knopf.
Cover of Langston Hughes’s “Not Without Laughter,” published by Knopf.

Shane Graham, Associate Professor of English at Utah State University, is the author of South African Literature after the Truth Commission: Mapping Loss (2009), and the principal editor of Langston Hughes and the South African Drum Generation: The Correspondence (2010). He has published articles in Modern Fiction Studies, Theatre Research International, Studies in the Novel, and Research in African Literatures, and he serves as Reviews Editor for Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies. His work at the Ransom Center was funded by an Alfred A. and Blanche W. Knopf Fellowship.

An Alfred A. and Blanche W. Knopf Fellowship allowed me to spend a month at the Harry Ransom Center exploring the connections between African-American poet Langston Hughes and black writers throughout the Caribbean, Africa, and Europe. I began this research some time ago at the Beinecke Library at Yale University, where the great majority of Langston Hughes’s papers are deposited. The Ransom Center holdings allowed me to expand and enrich my investigation into these transatlantic connections in innumerable ways.

For instance, the Knopf records and the Nancy Cunard papers contain correspondence with Hughes, typescripts of his poems, essays, and speeches, and media clippings about his books. Moreover, the Transcription Centre records include information about its parent organization, the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF), which established important links between African and diasporic writers. The Transcription Centre papers also contain records and reports from the important “Conference for African Writers of English Expression” held at Makerere College in Uganda in 1962, which the CCF co-organized and which Hughes attended as a guest of honor. These holdings provide small but important pieces to the jigsaw puzzle I am trying to complete sketching the transnational connections between Hughes and his many friends and correspondents.

Among other unexpected treasures I discovered were dozens of letters that Jamaican poet and novelist Claude McKay wrote to his agent and to Nancy Cunard in Paris, from a period when McKay himself was living in Marseille, Spain, and Morocco. While not proving an immediate link to Langston Hughes, these letters do establish McKay as an equally transnational figure and have prompted me to return to the Langston Hughes papers to investigate the two men’s relationship. I’m happy to report, then, that my time at the Ransom Center opened up an important new area to explore in my book-in-progress.

Filed Under: Research + Teaching Tagged With: African American literature, Alfred A. and Blanche W. Knopf fellowship, Alfred Knopf, Blanche Knopf, Charles McKay, Congress for Cultural Freedom, diaspora, fellow, Fellows Find, Fellowships, Langston Hughes, Nancy Cunard, Research, Shane Graham, Transcription Centre

Ur-Knopf: An early Knopf book is reunited with larger Knopf library

March 8, 2012 - Richard Oram

Cover of one of the very earliest Knopf imprints, Nicolai Gogol’s "Taras Bulba" (1915).

June 1915. Gene Stratton-Porter and Pollyanna held their dull sway over the American best-seller lists. A young publisher on the make, who had been fired by his house for planning to poach one of its authors, had just decided to go into business for himself. With seed money from his father, Alfred A. Knopf set up shop in one cramped room at 220 West 42nd Street in Manhattan. The other partner in the firm was Blanche Wolf, well-to-do, cultured, fluent in French, and already engaged to Alfred. The first book published by the firm that fall was the French dramatist Émile Augier’s Four Plays. The Ransom Center owns the entire limited edition (two copies, bound in different shades of morocco leather) bound for Alfred, which he gave to his father (“Pater”) and Blanche (“V.V.”) in September 1915 (the trade edition went on sale the next month). Other than that, the firm’s very earliest productions are not represented in the couple’s huge personal library, now at the Ransom Center. Apparently the Knopfs were not sentimental about their roots.

So it came as a surprise when the Ransom Center was recently offered a copy of one of the very earliest Knopf imprints, Nicolai Gogol’s Taras Bulba, with the bookplate of Blanche Wolf, soon to be Blanche Knopf, and bearing an early bookplate from the firm’s library. Taras Bulba headed the first Knopf advertisement in Publisher’s Weekly of September 25, 1915, along with other Russian books. At the outset, the Knopf list included a large proportion of foreign authors, especially French and Russian ones, mainly because it was relatively easy to obtain their American rights. Within a few years, Knopf, Inc.’s Borzoi Books, as they were named because of Blanche’s short-lived attachment to the famously stupid dog breed, would catch the attention of the publishing world because of its superb literary taste and striking book designs.

When the book arrived, I held in my hand a bit of the Ur-Knopf, from the days before Alfred and Blanche were married, before the hallowed Borzoi Books name was on a book (though the dog himself had already made his first appearance as a logo), and before Alfred implemented his notion that a trade book could be beautifully designed (Taras Bulba is in truth a rather plain book). How or why the volume was removed from the Knopfs’ library remains a mystery. The book economy works in strange and mysterious ways, and we can only marvel that Blanche’s book has now been reunited with the rest of the library.

Please click the thumbnails below to view full-size images.

 

Cover of one of the very earliest Knopf imprints, Nicolai Gogol’s "Taras Bulba" (1915). The inside cover shows the bookplate of Blanche Wolf, soon to be Blanche Knopf, and bears an early bookplate from the firm’s library.
Cover of one of the very earliest Knopf imprints, Nicolai Gogol’s “Taras Bulba” (1915). The inside cover shows the bookplate of Blanche Wolf, soon to be Blanche Knopf, and bears an early bookplate from the firm’s library.
Nicolai Gogol's "Taras Bulba" headed the first Knopf advertisement in Publisher’s Weekly of September 25, 1915, along with other Russian books.
Nicolai Gogol’s “Taras Bulba” headed the first Knopf advertisement in Publisher’s Weekly of September 25, 1915, along with other Russian books.
Cover of one of the very earliest Knopf imprints, Nicolai Gogol’s "Taras Bulba" (1915).
Cover of one of the very earliest Knopf imprints, Nicolai Gogol’s “Taras Bulba” (1915).

Filed Under: Books + Manuscripts Tagged With: Blanche Knopf, Blanche Wolf, Borzoi Books, Knopf, Knopf archive, Nicolai Gogol, Publishing, publishing history, Taras Bulba

New book sheds some light on "The House of Knopf"

July 1, 2010 - Richard Oram

Blanche and Alfred Knopf, early 1920s. Their first dogs were borzois, which supplied a name for Knopf, Inc.'s famous "Borzoi Books." Blanche came to despise them and had switched to other breeds by this time. Knopf, Inc. archive.

We have read thousands of letters to and from Knopf authors, editorial reports, publicity materials, and sales accounts. Despite having lived in their “house,” read their personal letters, and viewed Alfred’s photographs, I don’t feel that I understand either of the Knopfs particularly well. Both were temperamental and rife with contradictions. This may explain why despite their importance in the history of publishing, the Knopfs have yet to be the subjects of a book-length biography, although there have been attempts, and several projects are currently underway.

Alfred and Blanche Knopf were both notoriously demanding of themselves, their editorial staff, and their authors. When Knopf, Inc. burst onto the American publishing scene in 1915, the couple were among the few Jewish publishers. Alfred was famously denied admittance to a lunchtime circle of publishers, whereupon he formed his own. Their status as outsiders may have something to do with their aggressive, take-no-prisoners business style. Or to put it another way, the Knopfs had ‘tude. And they had style. In a button-down world of publishing, Alfred stood out with his lavender shirts and strident ties; a London tailor once refused to make a shirt out of some brightly hued cloth the publisher had chosen. Blanche, attired in Parisian haute couture, lived near the edge, subsisting largely on salads and martinis. As a female publishing executive, she too was a pioneer with something to prove.

Yet the Knopfs had a softer, gentler side. By the 1920s, they had decided to live independent lives in separate apartments, but on weekends they generally retired to “The Hovel” up the Hudson, in Purchase, New York, to live an apparently tranquil country life. There they frequently entertained their friends and authors, who were often the same people. The Knopfs had a knack for engaging their best authors on a personal level, wining and dining them (Alfred was a noted gourmet and oenophile) and exuding charm. Blanche bought a trenchcoat for Albert Camus and gloves for Elizabeth Bowen. Alfred took snapshots and made home movies of the guests. The devotion of these authors and others, such as Carl Van Vechten and H. L. Mencken, radiates from their letters. As Alfred Knopf maintained, “a publishing house is known by the company it keeps,” and by that measure both the Knopfs were the greatest publishers of their day.

Please click the thumbnails below to view full-size images.

Blanche Knopf, 1940s. Knopf, Inc. archive.
Blanche Knopf, 1940s. Knopf, Inc. archive.
Knopf billboard advertisement in Manhattan for Warwick Deeping's Sorrell and Son. Deeping, a now forgotten British mystery writer, sold extremely well in the 1920s. Knopf, Inc. archive.
Knopf billboard advertisement in Manhattan for Warwick Deeping’s Sorrell and Son. Deeping, a now forgotten British mystery writer, sold extremely well in the 1920s. Knopf, Inc. archive.
A Knopf ad for H. L. Mencken, Alfred's good friend. Knopf, Inc. archive.
A Knopf ad for H. L. Mencken, Alfred’s good friend. Knopf, Inc. archive.
Wallace Stevens, the award-winning poet, in the early 1950s. Taken by Alfred Knopf.
Wallace Stevens, the award-winning poet, in the early 1950s. Taken by Alfred Knopf.
Photograph of Carl Van Vechten, now known more for his associations with the Harlem Renaissance than for his own novels, inscribed to the Knopfs in 1917. Knopf, Inc. archive.
Photograph of Carl Van Vechten, now known more for his associations with the Harlem Renaissance than for his own novels, inscribed to the Knopfs in 1917. Knopf, Inc. archive.
Blanche and Alfred Knopf, early 1920s. Their first dogs were borzois, which supplied a name for Knopf, Inc.'s famous "Borzoi Books." Blanche came to despise them and had switched to other breeds by this time. Knopf, Inc. archive.
Blanche and Alfred Knopf, early 1920s. Their first dogs were borzois, which supplied a name for Knopf, Inc.’s famous “Borzoi Books.” Blanche came to despise them and had switched to other breeds by this time. Knopf, Inc. archive.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: Alfred A. Knopf, Blanche Knopf, literature

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