Manga Book (British Museum) - Thames & Hudson

Manga is a visual form of storytelling. Its roots are international, but the form we know today developed in Japan between the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and has recently achieved global reach. Initially limited to comics, graphics, and graphic novels, manga expanded into animation, fashion, gaming, street art, and new media. It is a multi-billion-pound industry, popular among people of all ages in Japan and increasingly worldwide, covering hundreds of topics from gender to adventure, in real or imagined worlds. There is a manga for everyone.

For manga fans, this book celebrates the excitement of intercultural charm and the long history of breaking barriers. For those just starting their manga journey, it offers an opportunity to acquire reading and writing skills, which quickly become a universal visual grammar in our globalized age.

This volume, organized into six thematic chapters with essays by leading scholars, presents the work of the most influential Japanese manga artists (mangaka) from past and present, with printed excerpts from manga, original drawings, manga magazines, theatre, film, digital technologies, and exclusive interviews with artists, editors, and publishers.

Published in conjunction with a groundbreaking exhibition at the British Museum, it is a manga like the Western audience has never seen before: diverse, but widely recognized, traditional, yet highly modern, rooted in printed 2D pages but easily jumping out of them.

Thames & Hudson was founded in 1949 by Walter and Eva Neurath. Their greatest passion and mission was to create a “museum without walls” and to make the world of art, as well as cutting-edge research, accessible to a broad audience. To reflect international perspectives, the company’s name combined the rivers flowing through London and New York, represented in its logo by two dolphins symbolizing friendship and intelligence, one facing east, the other west, suggesting a connection between the Old World and the New.

Today, still an independent family business, Thames & Hudson is one of the world’s leading publishers of illustrated books, with over 2,000 titles published. It publishes high-quality books across all areas of visual creativity: arts (fine, applied, decorative, performing), architecture, design, photography, fashion, film, and music, as well as archaeology, history, and popular culture. The company is also expanding its list of children’s books. Headquartered in London with a sister company in New York and branches in Melbourne, Singapore, and Hong Kong. In Paris, another subsidiary, Interart, distributes English-language books in France.

History of Thames & Hudson

Walter Neurath was born in Vienna in 1903. In 1938, he left his hometown — where he ran an art gallery and published illustrated books — for London. Initially, he worked as a production director at Adprint, a company founded by Viennese émigré Wolfgang Foges. Neurath and Foges developed a pioneering concept of what is now called book packaging (or co-publishing), where book ideas are developed, commissioned, produced, and sold to publishers operating in different markets and languages, to create large print runs and thus reduce unit production costs. Neurath’s concept was the first of many innovations introduced to the publishing world through Thames & Hudson.

Seeking to continue book packaging in a second edition and recognizing the need to amortize the high costs of producing illustrated books, Neurath established his own publishing house, with offices in London and New York, in the autumn of 1949. Eva Neurath, who arrived in London from Berlin in 1939, was a co-founder.

Of the ten titles published on Thames & Hudson’s first list in 1950, *English Cathedrals*, with photographs by Martin Hürlimann, was the first and most successful. The firm’s strong conviction from the very beginning in the longevity of books remained in print until 1971. Also in the first year of publication was *Out of My Later Years* by Albert Einstein, an early indicator of the program’s scope. As the list gradually expanded—from ten titles in 1950 to 144 in 1955—the company moved its offices from High Holborn and, in 1956, relocated to a Georgian townhouse at 30 Bloomsbury Street, near Bedford Square, becoming the epicenter of book publishing in London. The manufacturing remained at this address, eventually expanding to five houses by 1999, when it returned to High Holborn.

In 1958, Thames & Hudson launched one of its most famous series, *World of Art*, which became the foundation of a highly diverse list. Characterized by pocket-sized editions with black spines, the series expanded in just seven years to include 49 titles. Nearly 60 years later, the series boasts over 300 titles, which, according to Christopher Frayling, are “stained with paint copies” in every art school across the country.

Other important series that added depth and prestige to the list include *Ancient People and Places*, edited by Glyn Daniel, who from the 1950s contributed to pioneering interest in archaeology, both in book form and television. Over 34 titles were published in this series over 34 years. The large-format *Great Civilizations* series, published in 1961, featured contributions from esteemed scholars such as Alan Bullock, Asa Briggs, Hugh Trevor-Roper, A. J. P. Taylor, and John Julius Norwich.
After building one of the most important publishing houses in Europe in less than two decades, Walter Neurath died in 1967 at the age of 63. The sculptor Henry Moore wrote that “his death was a loss to our cultural life”. Sir Herbert Read noted that Neurath “more than anyone else was responsible for the revolution in art publishing” and was “one of those rare entrepreneurs who successfully combine business acumen with idealism.” Eva Neurath became chairwoman. Walter’s son, Thomas, who joined the company in 1961 along with his sister Constance, became managing director; Constance later served as art director for several decades. Both Thomas and Constance remain on the Thames & Hudson board, as do Thomas’s daughters, Johanna and Susanna.
From producing the first commercial edition of *The Book of Kells* to the triumphant publication of the six-volume *Vincent van Gogh — Letters*, from innovations like “French folds” to the controversial documentation of graffiti art in *Subway Art*, Thames & Hudson has always been at the forefront, both culturally and in terms of production techniques.

The year 2016 marked an extraordinary new chapter for the company, announcing a publishing partnership with two of the world’s most important museums: the British Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum.

The world of art and scholarships remains at the heart of Thames & Hudson's publishing program, which stays true to its core principle: providing a "museum without walls".
Today, Thames & Hudson is a recognizable international brand that symbolizes British publishing. Their extensive catalog includes thousands of original book titles. Many of these are luxury collector's editions.

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