Though Thames & Hudson has for seventy-six years been one of the admired imprints in worldwide illustrated guide publishing, the person who steered its fortunes since he inherited the corporate virtually sixty years in the past was a lot much less well-known. Thomas Neurath by no means sought publicity for himself. He didn’t conform to most of the preconceptions about a fantastic writer: he prevented lengthy lunches if he might (he had no head for alcohol) and—since he invariably had a packet of cigarettes at hand—his dislike of events deepened after it turned socially unacceptable to smoke. His life was virtually wholly absorbed by the agency based in London in 1949 by his Austrian émigré father, Walter Neurath, and German stepmother, Eva Feuchtwang. Though he could at first have had conflicted emotions about taking over accountability for Thames & Hudson whereas nonetheless a really younger man—following Walter’s early dying in 1967—he introduced a single-minded power and mental bravura to the duty of creating the agency’s lists, editorially, technically and commercially. His chief monument is the standard of the books printed by Thames & Hudson, however the truth that it stays an entirely unbiased household agency is sort of as spectacular.
Walter Neurath and his spouse, Marianne Müller, a schoolteacher, escaped Vienna with some issue after the Anschluss. As a Jew who had been the supervisor of an anti-Nazi writer, he was doubly a marked man. Their first youngster, Constance, was born in 1938, adopted two years later by Thomas. Walter had been given a job in London by a fellow Austrian refugee, Wolfgang Foges, in a agency referred to as Adprint, which circumvented wartime paper shortages by packaging – that’s, taking books as much as the stage of printing – for different publishers. In 1950 Marianne died and three years later Walter married Eva, a former colleague in Adprint, having sunk each their financial savings in founding a brand new agency, Thames & Hudson, named after the 2 rivers to replicate its ambitions to publish on either side of the Atlantic.
Thomas resembled his father in necessary methods: each had been emotionally reticent males who mixed beaming allure with an explosive mood. Life within the Neurath family in Highgate was left-leaning and high-minded. The remnants of the household’s assortment of works by such painters as Oskar Kokoschka and Egon Schiele held on the partitions—the remaining had been bought to assist assist the brand new agency—and there have been visits from artists who shaped the topics of its books, from Barbara Hepworth to Sidney Nolan. This nurtured Thomas’s inexhaustible curiosity about artwork and pictures. Shut relationships with artists had been to be an necessary a part of his publishing profession, notably with David Hockney, whose collaborations with Thames & Hudson prolong from David Hockney by David Hockney, edited by Nikos Stangos, which when printed in 1976 performed an necessary half in establishing the artist’s worldwide superstar, to {the catalogue} of Hockney’s nice retrospective this 12 months on the Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris.
Thomas Neurath: a selected enthusiasm for images and a priority for the operate of the image caption Courtesy: Thames & Hudson
At any time when he might, Thomas mixed enterprise overseas with exploration of museums and galleries. One colleague summoned to Thomas’s workplace after he had returned from a visit to Karlsruhe anticipated to debate the offers that had been made however was given as a substitute an excited account of a go to to an exhibition of sound artwork on the ZKM Media Museum: “Are you able to think about? A museum of sound!” Thomas was as soon as heard to lament “I’ve run out of partitions”—speaking of the house in north London he shared with the Swedish-born jewelry designer Gun Thor, whom he married in 1962, and their two daughters, Johanna and Susanna—however he by no means stopped compulsively shopping for books.
Thomas Neurath’s cosmopolitanism belied his standard English schooling. Charterhouse was adopted by Archaeology and Anthropology at St John’s School, Cambridge, however though he had a deep curiosity in each topics, he left with out taking a level. After absconding overseas—Walter is alleged to have used non-public detectives to trace him down—Thomas was introduced again to work as an editor in Thames & Hudson’s Bloomsbury workplaces in 1961. He was moulded for the succession, with an sad stint working for a writer in Israel and a really pleased interval in Paris as an intern with the French writer Éditions Arthaud. Boarding on the Beat Resort, he soaked up town’s bohemian mental tradition, and ever afterwards considered the Left Financial institution as in some sense dwelling. His opening of an workplace for Thames & Hudson in Paris in 1989 was the fulfilment of a protracted ambition. There was a streak of the beatnik in his make-up. He had, for instance, a weak spot for the beliefs about leylines and earth mysteries promulgated by John Michell, whose books be printed, to the annoyance of a number of the authors on the agency’s distinguished archaeology listing.
Walter’s dying on the age of solely sixty-three reworked Thomas’s life. Eva assumed the position of Chairman (her most well-liked time period), Thomas turned managing director and Constance was appointed head of the design division. This was a extra equal distribution of tasks than it might have been in different publishers. Ever because the days of Adprint, the best for Walter and Eva, and now Thomas, was the mixing of textual content and photos—not solely bodily, on the web page, itself uncommon in mid-century publishing, but additionally intellectually. Each phrases and photos are necessary individually, however the success of a guide, they believed, depends upon the best way they work collectively. Interviewing a candidate for an editor’s job, Thomas would ask not about their language expertise (though these had been necessary) however what they thought made a great unfold—the elemental part of publishing on the Thames & Hudson mannequin—and what was the operate of a caption?
Adprint had taught the Neuraths the business benefits for Thames & Hudson of publishing books in collection, most famously the cheap black-spined World of Artwork paperbacks (finally numbering some 300 titles), which had been a pioneering expression of a need to democratise entry to the humanities. Commercially, nonetheless, the agency’s long-term fortunes relied on publishing books for the worldwide English-language market concurrently with editions in French and German, and sometimes Spanish, Italian and different languages as nicely. Thomas inherited and enlarged expert groups, usually European in origin, in book-production and movie analysis in addition to enhancing and design. Unusually, Thames & Hudson appreciated to maintain its experience in home relatively than depend on freelancers. Thomas was a demanding employer but additionally a protecting and even possessive one who might seem visibly distressed when instructed {that a} promising younger worker was leaving for an additional job.
Whereas his father had considered artwork in elevated phrases— nice work, sculpture and structure—Thomas had a extra inclusive imaginative and prescient of visible tradition. Pictures was a selected enthusiasm, and he made it a extremely worthwhile a part of the listing (notably by means of collaborations with the Magnum photographic company), as he did vogue, though detached to garments for their very own sake. He deplored the widespread assumption of in any other case educated those that there was one thing frivolous about “image books”. When as a younger editor at Thames & Hudson I commented that I used to be trying ahead to the evaluations of a images guide I had been engaged on, he instructed me with a sigh that I might be disenchanted: “The Instances Literary Complement will give an entire web page to a novel by an unknown author, however once we publish a serious monograph on Cartier-Bresson all we get is an image and a caption.” That was stated forty years in the past. Most media retailers now regard illustrated books far more significantly, and for that Thomas Neurath can take a lot of the credit score.
Thomas Neurath, born Brackley, Northamptonshire, 7 October 1940; managing director, Thames & Hudson 1967-2005, chairman 2005-21; married 1962 Gun Thor (two daughters); died London 13 June 2025.
