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Boni & Liveright was an American trade book publisher established in 1917 in New York City by Albert Boni and Horace Liveright. Over the next sixteen years the firm, which changed its name to Horace Liveright, Inc., in 1928 and then Liveright, Inc., in 1931, published over a thousand books.〔Egleston, 3–4〕 Before their bankruptcy in 1933 and their subsequent reorganization as Liveright Publishing Corporation, Inc., they had achieved considerable notoriety for their editorial acumen, brash marketing, and challenge to contemporary obscenity and censorship laws.〔Gilmer, vii–ix〕 Their logo is of a cowled monk. They were the first American publishers of William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, Sigmund Freud, e.e. cummings, Jean Toomer, Hart Crane, Lewis Mumford, Anita Loos, and the Modern Library series. In addition to being the house of Theodore Dreiser and Sherwood Anderson throughout the 1920s, they notably published T.S. Eliot's ''The Waste Land'', Isadora Duncan's ''My Life'', Nathanael West's ''Miss Lonelyhearts'', Djuna Barnes's ''Ryder'', Ezra Pound's ''Personae'', John Reed's ''Ten Days That Shook the World'', and Eugene O'Neill's plays. In his biography of Horace Liveright, ''Firebrand'', author Tom Dardis noted B&L was "the most magnificent yet messy publishing firm this century has seen."〔Dardis,xii〕 In 1974 their remaining backlist was bought by W.W. Norton and has recently been revived as an imprint. ==Beginnings and Modern Library== With outside investment that principally came from Horace Liveright's father-in-law, paper executive Herman Elsas, Boni & Liveright incorporated on February 16, 1917.〔Egleston, 5〕 Though Liveright had no publishing experience (he had been a bond and paper salesman), Albert Boni recently had run a Greenwich Village bookshop with his brother, Charles. Boni's association with Village bohemia and his earlier success publishing a line of inexpensive, pocket-sized classics called the Little Leather Library served as inspiration for B&L's debut list called "The Modern Library of the World's Best Books."〔Egleston, 20〕 A mix of well-known and hard-to-find literature priced at 60 cents apiece and bound in lambskin, the Modern Library in 1917, according to biographer Walker Gilmer, "reflected the avant-garde influence of (Boni's ) Washington Square book-borrowing friends: Wilde, ''The Picture of Dorian Gray''; Strindberg, ''Married''; Kipling, ''Soldiers Three''; Stevenson, ''Treasure Island''; Wells, ''The War in the Air''; Ibsen, ''A Doll's House'', ''An Enemy of the People'', and ''Ghosts''; France, ''The Red Lily''; de Maupassant, ''Mademoiselle Fifi, and Other Stories''; Nietzsche, ''Thus Spoke Zarathustra''; Dostoyevsky, ''Poor Folk''; Maeterlinck, ''A Miracle of Saint Anthony''; and Schopenhauer, ''Studies in Pessimism''."〔Gilmer, 11〕 Boni & Liveright, like other new publishers of the era such as Alfred A. Knopf, sold to customers predominantly in the Northeast and California.〔Welky, 150〕 The success was immediate and demand for more titles forced Boni & Liveright to expand the initial list to 36 before the year ended.〔Egleston, 25〕 It would quickly become the cornerstone for the young company and allow the firm to take on riskier books and high-profile authors. The sale of the Modern Library to Bennett Cerf has been noted by biographer Tom Dardis as a critical tactical error and major loss of revenue that likely crippled the firm in their final years of operation.〔Dardis, 232〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア(Wikipedia)』 ■ウィキペディアで「Boni & Liveright」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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