Alfred A. Knopf

Alfred A. Knopf was founded in 1915 by Alfred A. Knopf Sr. and Blanche Knopf in New York City, with a $5,000 advance from Alfred's father Samuel. The first office was in the Candler Building on West 42nd Street. From the start, the firm focused on European literature, publishing works by Russian, French, and Polish authors, and quickly built a list that included Willa Cather, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and Thomas Mann. Blanche designed the borzoi (Russian wolfhound) colophon in 1925, and it remains the publisher's most recognizable mark.

Knopf has always treated the physical book as a crafted object. It employed typographers and designers including Bruce Rogers, William Addison Dwiggins, and later Chip Kidd and Peter Mendelsund. Every Knopf hardcover closes with a colophon page describing the typeface, and the title page carries the printing year. The publisher also maintains a long-running list in cookbooks, from Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking to more recent titles under its Knopf Cooks program.

Random House acquired Knopf in 1960. In 2008 and 2009 the Knopf group merged with Doubleday to form the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, now a division of Penguin Random House, which is majority-owned by Bertelsmann AG. The Knopf imprint retains its own editorial team and distinctive identity within that larger structure.

The list spans literary fiction, narrative nonfiction, history, biography, and poetry. Among the books on this page, Yaa Gyasi's Homegoing, Robert A. Caro's The Power Broker, and Andrea Wulf's The Invention of Nature all carry the borzoi on their spines. The broader roster includes Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, Kazuo Ishiguro, Joan Didion, Gabriel García Márquez, and Alice Munro. Sixteen Knopf authors have won the Nobel Prize and twenty-six the Pulitzer. What a reader can expect is a hardcover that looks and feels considered, a list that favors ambitious literary work, and an editorial culture that values both the words on the page and the design around them.