Walter Neurath (1903–1967) was a British publisher, the co-founder in 1949, with his wife, Eva Neurath, of Thames & Hudson.
Early life
Neurath was born in Josefstädterstrasse, Vienna, Austria on the 1st October 1903, the only child of Alois Neurath (1872–1934) and his wife, Gisela Fröhlich (d. 1944), who had moved from Bratislava ten years earlier. Walter spent his entire childhood in Vienna, where his father owned a wholesale tea, coffee, and luxury foods importation business. He was educated at the Volks Schule and the Real Gymnasium from which he matriculated with distinction. He then attended the University of Vienna where he studied art history, archaeology, and history, becoming, in 1922, a member of the Institute for Art History. At the same time he worked for the art book publisher Würthle & Sohn and organized various art exhibitions, including one in Paris of nineteenth-century French paintings from Viennese collections. He also lectured on art history to the Austrian equivalent of the Workers' Educational Association.
Career
Vienna
After four years working in the family firm, acquiring routine business skills, in 1929 Neurath turned to full-time publishing, with a strong interest in printing and typography. He joined the Verlag für Kulturforschung (‘publishing house for cultural research’), and Zinner Verlag, which published fiction and where, after six months, he was made production director. There he published a number of illustrated books, and German language translations of English and American books. The rise to power in Germany of the Nazi Party effectively closed the main German language market for this Jewish firm which therefore decided to cease trading in 1935.
For the next two years Neurath worked as an educational publisher, developing new illustration techniques and creating, as general editor, a series of illustrated textbooks for children designed as an educational counter-influence to Nazi ideology. The books had a strong democratic and anti-totalitarian bias and were translated into seven foreign languages by like-minded publishers abroad. In 1937 Neurath was appointed manager of the Wilhelm Frick publishing house, where he continued to commission and publish both illustrated books on the arts and anti-Nazi propaganda. However, on the occupation of Austria by the Nazis he was ordered to cease publishing immediately and a Nazi-approved Commissar was appointed to run the company.
England
Because of his anti-Nazi publishing activities, Neurath was soon on the Gestapo lists and, after several near misses and a period in hiding, managed to escape to England on 1 June 1938, taking with him his second wife, Marianne. His sponsor for entry into England as an alien was Frances Margesson, wife of Captain (later Viscount) Margesson; the Neuraths stayed with the Margessons at Boddington, near Rugby, for some five years and their son Thomas was born there. Neurath was offered work by a company called Adprint, run by a fellow refugee, Wolfgang Foges. He soon became the production manager designing and producing the successful King Penguin series, effectively Penguin's first hardcover books. Neurath went on to develop a more ambitious series called Britain in Pictures, edited by Walter J. Turner in which the illustrations were an integral part of a book, prominently placed together with the words to which they were related, rather than banishing them to the plates section elsewhere the book. The series combined skilful picture research with fine design and printing including significant texts from George Orwell (The English People), Rose Macaulay (Life among the English), John Piper (British Romantic Artists), Michael Ayrton (British Drawings), and Jacquetta Hawkes (Early Britain); the series eventually comprised more than 100 volumes.
Neurath was not yet a naturalised British citizen and was dispatched to an internment camp on the Isle of Man, alongside musicians later to become the Amadeus Quartet and other distinguished and blameless European artists and intellectuals viewed as enemy aliens. Happily, aware that the Britain in Pictures series had considerable propaganda value, a friendly civil servant, Richard Cowell, managed to get Neurath released rapidly and he was soon back at work, with eventual naturalization as a British subject to follow.