Establishment in Moscow (Fall 1922) International Publishers Company, Inc., was founded in 1924 with funds given the project by
Abraham A. Heller. Heller was the radical son of a wealthy jeweler doing business in
Paris. He expanded his fortune as head of the International Oxygen Company, a
welding supply company that operated a trade concession in Soviet Russia during the time of the
New Economic Policy in the early 1920s. A lifelong socialist, Heller had previously been a heavy financial donor to the
New York Call, the Socialist Party's New York daily newspaper. He had been instrumental in funding the purchase of the headquarters building for the
Rand School of Social Science. The company began with a capital stock of $50,000, paid in by Heller, with the stock subsequently split with Trachtenberg as compensation.
Alexander Trachtenberg, a left wing member of the
Socialist Party of America associated with the
Rand School of Social Science and its publishing house, who joined the Communist movement at the end of 1921, served as manager of International Publishers from its inception through the 1940s. In a letter dated June 1924 from the party's head Literature Department,
Nicholas Dozenberg cautioned Trachtenberg that
Charles H. Kerr & Co. of Chicago had already published many standard titles by
Karl Marx, thus limiting the prospects of successful new editions of the same works. Among these were some 40–50 bookstores, owned and operated by various district organizations of the Communist Party. Despite its semi-independent status legally, International Publishers functioned practically as the official US publisher of Communist Party literature. Meanwhile, in 1927 the Party renamed its "Daily Worker Publishing Company" to parallel International Publishers as the "Workers Library Publishers." The Party also limited activity of the Workers Library Publishers largely to the issuance of propaganda
pamphlets and the publication of official Party magazines. International Publishers focused on publishing
hardcover and
paperback books, with only some pamphlet literature (and at a much slower pace). As the decade of the 1930s came to a close, some 90% of International's catalog were titles published in bound book form, only 10% were pamphlets. The Book Union first offered an anthology entitled
Proletarian Literature in the United States, nearly 400 pages long and edited by current or future editors of
The New Masses:
Michael Gold,
Granville Hicks, Joseph North, and others. Trachtenberg indicated that International Publishers did not own presses but used the services of a company called Van Rees Press on a contract basis. The firm also exchanged printed sheets for publication with its British sister organization,
Lawrence & Wishart, and bought sheets for binding from the forerunner of the official
Foreign Languages Publishing House in Moscow. He estimated that some 10% of International Publishers' books had made use of such sources but that a lowering of
duty rates on bound books had largely eliminated the economy of importing unbound sheets. Trachtenberg estimated annual sales by International Publishers at $75,000 to $80,000. He noted that the company had a staff of four.
Recent years During the 1960s and 1970s, International expanded its publication of inexpensive
trade paperback books under the title "New World Paperbacks". A number of titles bore this as an alternative company logo. ==Important publications==