Ten Speed Press
American publishing house
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Ten Speed Press is a publishing house founded in Berkeley, California, in 1971 by Phil Wood.[5] It was bought by Random House in February 2009 and became part of their Crown Publishing Group division.
| |
| Parent company | Crown Publishing Group (Random House) |
|---|---|
| Founded | 1971 |
| Founder | Phil Wood[1][2][3][4] |
| Country of origin | United States |
| Publication types | Books |
| Imprints | Lorena Jones, 4 Color, Watson-Guptill |
| Official website | crownpublishing.com/ten-speed-press |
Ten Speed's all-time best-seller is What Color is Your Parachute? A Practical Manual for Job-Hunters and Career-Changers by Richard N. Bolles (1972). It has been reissued in new editions and, as of 2009, has sold more than ten million copies, translated into 20 languages.[6]
Ten Speed has published numerous other non-fiction titles, including Moosewood Cookbook, White Trash Cooking, Why Cats Paint, The Bread Baker's Apprentice, Vegetable Literacy, Yotam Ottolenghi's Jerusalem, Franklin Barbecue, and Marie Kondo's The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up (2014). The books are usually colorfully designed. They are sometimes published in odd shapes to match their whimsical subjects. Ten Speed Press publishes 150 books a year under all of its imprints.[7]
History
Founder Phil Wood worked with Barnes & Noble in 1962, Penguin Books in 1965, and had a senior sales position at Penguin Books in Baltimore and New York before founding Ten Speed Press in 1971.[8]
Ten Speed's first book was Tom Cuthbertson's Anybody's Bike Book,[9][10] which is still in print. It inspired the publisher's name and has sold more than a million copies.[10]
In 1983, Ten Speed acquired Celestial Arts (Millbrae, CA),[11] "founded in the late 1960s as a printer of rock music posters,"[8] from Gary Kurtz,[12] a Star Wars producer.[13][14][15]
In 2002, the company acquired Crossing Press, a publisher specializing in metaphysics, alternative lifestyles, and healing.[13]
By 2009, the company published under its four imprints — Ten Speed Press, Celestial Arts, Crossing Press, and Tricycle Press — more than 100 new hardcovers and trade paperbacks annually, and had a backlist of more than 1,000 active titles.[16]
Ten Speed Press was bought by Random House in February 2009 and became part of their Crown Publishing Group division. Founder Phil Wood died of cancer in December 2010.[17]
Watson-Guptill became an imprint of Ten Speed Press under Random House in 2013, part of their Crown Publishing Group.[18]
Tricycle Press
Tricycle Press was the children's imprint of Ten Speed Press, which published the Amelia's Notebooks series,[19] among others. Tricycle also published Who's in a Family? in 1997 and King & King in 2002,[20] books that addressed different types of families, including those headed by gay parents. The imprint ceased publishing new books in 2011.[21][22]