,
Bloomsbury, London. Hecht started Souvenir Press in 1951 in his bedroom at his parents' flat with a loan of £250, "a bed, a desk, a typewriter and a phone in the hall", his first book being "a paperback on cricket entitled ''Len Hutton: The World's Greatest Batsman'', written by a college friend and retailing at two shillings (ten pence)." Hecht successfully built the business up and ran the company for more than six decades. Producing an eccentric list of titles ("His authors have ranged from Argentine revolutionary
Che Guevara to comic chronicler of the British upper classes,
PG Wodehouse, from Norwegian
Kon Tiki adventurer
Thor Heyerdahl to tap dance legend
Fred Astaire...") from a notoriously untidy office in
Bloomsbury, Hecht was quoted as saying: "Anyone can create a high-class literary list of prestige titles. It's better to have a balanced list, comprising books that make money and those perhaps more worthy titles that don't. My adage is that a publisher’s first duty to an author is to remain solvent." Nevertheless, characterised as a risk-taker, As he said in an interview with
Matthew Engel: "The rule of independent publishing is that there are no rules." Souvenir Press had more than 500 titles in print by the time of Hecht's death in 2018 and had number-one bestsellers on both sides of the Atlantic. Book series published by Souvenir included Condor Books, Human Horizons and Independent Voices. Hecht celebrated the company's 65th anniversary in April 2016. He published five
Nobel laureates, including Norwegian novelist
Knut Hamsun and the Chilean poet
Pablo Neruda. Hecht received the
British Book Awards Lifetime Achievement award in 2001, and he was a chairman of the Society of Bookmen. ==Music and theatre==