Correspondence files

CW [numerical series]

1878-1997

The firm that became Chatto & Windus in 1873 originated in the 1850s from the bookselling business of John Camden Hotten. On Hotten’s death, his employee Andrew Chatto acquired the business with a sleeping partner, W.E. Windus. In 1946 it acquired The Hogarth Press, which had been established in 1917 by Virginia and Leonard Woolf . In 1969 Chatto & Windus merged with Jonathan Cape, with all three imprints being retained, as was The Bodley Head when it joined the firm in 1973. In 1987 the group was purchased by Random House. English and American literature were the strengths of the list. The firm published many celebrated authors – Robert Louis Stevenson, Marcel Proust, Laurie Lee, Christopher Isherwood, Aldous Huxley, Sigmund Freud and Iris Murdoch among them. Cecil Day-Lewis, Poet Laureate, was editorial director in the 1960s. Source: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.co.uk/publishers/vintage/chatto-windus/

This series contains mainly editorial correspondence but also general correspondence of the company. They are arranged in a rough chronological order and then alphabetically by author or subject. The majority of loose correspondence was sent for salvage during the First World War and the files mostly date from 1915 onwards. There are some early files available, such as the correspondece of Mark Twain (CW 565) and some early papers regarding the history of the company (CW 591), but little other author correspondence has survived, although there are a few author letters pasted into the letterbooks of letters sent by the company (CW A).

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series