Walter and Eva Neurath Their Books Married Words with Pictures Tom

■ This article originally appeared in Logos 15/1, 2004, 12–19.

Walter and Eva Neurath Their books married words with pictures

Tom Rosenthal

This is the story of two remarkable people and one great publishing house. The story of Thames & Hudson is to a large extent the story of Walter and Eva Neurath and, as they met only as mature adults, each becoming the third spouse of the other, it is necessary to begin with their two separate life stories before dealing with the history of the publishing house which they founded, and in which their lives were inextricably mingled.

Walter Neurath was born in Vienna on October 1, 1903, the only child of Alois Neurath and Gisela Neurath (née Frölich). The Neurath family came from Bratislava in Czechoslovakia. Alois Neurath had arrived in Vienna, aged twenty-one, and worked in a bank until he was twenty-eight, when he founded his own business as a wholesale importer of tea, coffee and luxury foods. Walter spent his entire childhood in Vienna, where he was educated at the Volksschule and the Realgymnasium, from which he matriculated with distinction. At the University of Vienna 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 art exhibitions, including one in Paris of 19th century French paintings from Viennese collections. He also lectured on art history to the Austrian equivalent of the Workers’ Educational Association. He was a founder member of Neustift (New Foundations), a small left- wing commune of intellectuals with a radical approach to both life and culture, which included the future world-famous psychoanalyst Bruno Bettelheim, whose seminal work on the German Concentration Camps,

Having joined Thames & Hudson in 1959, Tom Rosenthal eventually became Managing Director of Thames & Hudson International, the co-publishing arm of the company, and a Director of the main Board. He left in 1971 to run Secker & Warburg and became Chairman of that firm and of William Heinemann. In 1984 he acquired André Deutsch Limited and retired in 1996 to become a full-time writer.

The Informed Heart, Neurath was to publish with great success nearly forty years later. In 1925 he married Lilly Kruk and, because of his father’s ill health, joined and ran the family firm, thus acquiring business skills which were of great value in his later career. On his father’s recovery 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 also the German-language translations of such British and American books as The Water Gypsies by A. P. Herbert, Mutiny on the Bounty by Nordhoff & Hall and The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck. The rise to power of the Nazi party in Germany effectively closed the main German-language market for this Jewish firm, which therefore decided to close down. From 1935 to 1937, Walter 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 the all-pervasive Nazi ideology. The books had a strong democratic and anti-totalitarian bias and were trans- lated 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. Upon the occupation of Austria by the Nazis, he was ordered to cease his activities immediately, and a Nazi-approved ‘Commissar’ was appointed to run the publishing house. Because of his anti-Nazi publishing activities, he was soon on the Gestapo lists. After several near misses and a period in hiding, he man- aged to get to England on June 1, 1938, along with his second wife, Marianne. (His first marriage had been dissolved in 1933.) 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 could not of course spend all his time in the country and was soon offered work by a company called Adprint, run by a fellow refugee, Wolfgang Foges. He soon became the Production Manager and designed and produced the celebrated King Penguin series. It was originally intended to print this series in Czechoslovakia but Germany’s invasion of