The company began as
Writers and Readers Publishing Cooperative, a
London, England-based publisher founded in 1974 With a successful format identified, further
For Beginners titles soon began to appear. The line's most enduring titles, all published during this period, were
Marx for Beginners (1976),
Lenin for Beginners (1977),
Freud for Beginners (1979),
Einstein for Beginners (1979), and
Darwin for Beginners (1982). In the early 1980s, questions of control arose after some members of the
cooperative sold U.S. rights to part of the
For Beginners series to
Pantheon Books. The cooperative officially disbanded in 1984. Following this rift, in 1987 Thompson took over as sole publisher and moved back to his hometown of
New York City to establish a legal foothold and prevent any further unauthorized distribution of titles. Based in
Harlem, the company was known as
Writers and Readers Publishing, Inc.; in moving the company to Harlem, Thompson's goal was to stimulate a new
Harlem Renaissance, in his creating an international publishing house there. He also started two other publishing companies:
The Harlem River Press, publishing children's poetry, and '''Black Butterfly Children's Books
, books for the inner-city child. The London-based company, formally established in 1992, was known as Writers and Readers Limited'''. For years, Thompson spent his time traveling between England and New York to manage the two companies. In 1992, Richard Appignanesi, who had been the first editor in London for the series and had also written several of the titles, co-created the new publisher
Icon Books, under whose imprint he republished several of the
For Beginner titles and continued to publish and expand a British version of the series called
Introducing. Meanwhile, the New York-based Writers and Readers continued the
For Beginners series, in several cases commissioning new authors to create replacement books for those being published in Britain. This led to a number of examples where the two ranges were publishing two different books on the same subject. Thompson died of cancer in London on September 7, 2001; by the time of his death, the company had published more than forty
For Beginners titles. Several years after Thompson's death, investors decided to buy the rights to the titles, creating
For Beginners, LLC. In the summer of 2007 For Beginners LLC re-released twenty of the prior
For Beginners titles and authorized the first new title,
Dada and Surrealism For Beginners. In 2010, the company released
FDR for Beginners by
Paul Buhle and
Sabrina Jones, with an afterword by
Harvey Pekar. == References ==