Gerald Duckworth founded the company in 1898, setting up its office at 3
Henrietta Street, Covent Garden. Staff included
Edward Garnett as literary advisor and
(Herbert) Jonathan Cape as the sales manager. Haycraft would run the company until his death in 1994. In this period Haycraft was described as a "one man university press" publishing at Duckworth a "body of works on Greek and Roman literature, philosophy and society" whose scholarship and originality "equalled the output of the large university houses". Meanwhile his wife, the writer
Alice Thomas Ellis, was Duckworth's fiction editor and was responsible for publishing "Duckworth's best-selling author",
Beryl Bainbridge. The company moved from Henrietta Street to The Old Piano Factory in
Camden, North London, on Old Gloucester Street, made famous by
Alan Bennett in his bestselling book,
The Lady in the Van. In the period from the 1970s to the 1990s authors published by the company including
John Bayley, Beryl Bainbridge,
Jeffrey Bernard, Alice Thomas Ellis,
Penelope Fitzgerald,
Ogden Nash,
Dorothy Parker and
Oliver Sacks. In 1998 the company celebrated its centenary and moved its premises to
Frith Street,
Soho. In 2003, the company suffered a financial collapse and was put into
receivership. Its assets were bought by
Peter Mayer, a former chief executive of
Penguin Books, who already owned
The Overlook Press of
New York City. Under new leadership, the company published authors such as
Max Brooks,
Julia Child,
J. J. Connolly,
Suzanne Fagence Cooper and
Ray Kurzweil. In 2010, Duckworth's academic list was acquired by
Bloomsbury Publishing. After Mayer's death in 2018, Duckworth was sold to Prelude Books and is now operated under the leadership of Pete Duncan and Matt Casbourne. Prelude Books rebranded itself under the name Duckworth Books and as of 2020 the company has been operating from an office in
Richmond-upon-Thames with a focus on publishing non-fiction and historical fiction. ==Book series==