Kahlil Gibran's The Prophet sold just 1,159 copies in its first year
A $5,000 advance from a father launched one of America's great publishers in 1915. Knopf went on to sign Willa Cather, Julia Child and Toni Morrison, and to champion a slow-burning book of poetic sermons that nearly nobody bought at first, then doubled its sales year after year.
Alfred Knopf and Blanche Knopf founded the firm together in 1915 with money from his father Samuel, working out of New York's Candler Building. Early lists leaned on European translations, cheap to acquire during the First World War, such as Gogol's Taras Bulba. The first real hit was a new edition of W. H. Hudson's Green Mansions, which sold over 20,000 copies by 1919.
The house stood out for marketing flair. To promote Floyd Dell's novel Moon-Calf, it paid men dressed as artists to walk the financial and theatre districts wearing sandwich boards with a browsing copy attached. Its handsome design and publicity lured Willa Cather away from Houghton Mifflin; she eventually published sixteen books with Knopf, including One of Ours, the firm's first Pulitzer winner. To this day every Knopf book ends with A Note on the Type, explaining the history of its typeface, and the borzoi colophon was Blanche's idea, chosen to suggest motion.
Blanche's role was long underplayed. Alfred had promised her equal partnership, yet a fifth-anniversary volume mentioned her only once, as the Mrs. Knopf who found a manuscript, although authors saw her as the soul of the company. She travelled to South America in 1942 and was among the first publishers to reach Europe after the war, bringing in writers from several continents, and she became president in 1957. The Prophet, released in 1923, shows the long game such a list could play: it sold 240,000 copies in 1965 and has never gone out of print.
Independence ended in 1960, when Random House bought the firm, a sale thought to have been prompted by the couple's son Pat leaving to start Atheneum. Editor Judith Jones, who acquired Mastering the Art of French Cooking, later worked with John Updike and Anne Tyler. Knopf now sits within Penguin Random House, and in its whole history it has had only four editors-in-chief.
Source: Alfred A. Knopf
