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Sort of Books is an independent publishing venture by Mark Ellingham and Natania Jansz, founders of the Rough Guide travel series. We set the company up in 1999 mainly to help our friend Chris Stewart launch his debut book, Driving Over Lemons, which became a surprise UK bestseller. Fired by its success, we have hand-picked two or three titles each year since. These have included three further Chris Stewart titles, the most recent of which, Three Ways to Capsize a Boat, is a laugh-out-loud prequel to Lemons, and the fiction that Moomins creator Tove Jansson wrote for grown-ups, notably The Summer Book, which has sold 100,000 copies since we re-launched it in 2003. This year, we have been proud to introduce a rediscovered classic by Stefan Zweig, The Post Office Girl, which the London Standard declared ‘better than anything on the current fiction bestseller lists’.
We have also put a foot in the water with popular science, publishing Robert Kunzig’s Aventis-winning Mapping the Deep, telling the extraordinary story of oceanography, and his recent Fixing Climate, with Wally Broecker – the man who coined the term ‘global warming’ and thinks he knows how to stop it.
Then there is graphic art (Peter Blegvad’s unique Leviathan), fiction (crime writer Simon Lewis, psychological thriller Sophie Hannah, and Tom Bullough – whose latest is the lyrical The Claude Glass), lucid and original nature writing from Kathleen Jamie (Findings), the best dog photo books ever (from designer Peter Dyer), and two of the most gorgeously designed children’s books of all time from Tove Jansson.
In short, we publish the sort of books we like.
Sort Of Books are edited by Natania Jansz and Mark Ellingham, supported by designers Peter Dyer (covers) and Henry Iles (website, text design and lay-out). |
