Ten Speed Press

Ten Speed Press is a publishing house founded in Berkeley, California in 1971 by Phil Wood.[5] Ten Speed Press was bought by Random House in February 2009 and is now part of their Crown Publishing Group division.

Ten Speed Press
Parent companyCrown Publishing Group (Random House)
Founded1971
FounderPhil Wood[1][2][3][4]
Country of originUnited States
Publication typesBooks
ImprintsLorena Jones, 4 Color, Watson-Guptill
Official websitecrownpublishing.com/ten-speed-press

History

Wood worked with Barnes & Noble in 1962, Penguin Books in 1965, and had a senior sales position at Penguin Books in Baltimore and New York before founding Ten Speed Press.[6] Wood died of cancer in December 2010.[7]

Ten Speed's first book was Anybody’s Bike Book,[8][9] which is still in print. It inspired the publisher's name and has sold more than a million copies.[9] Ten Speed's all-time best-seller is What Color is Your Parachute? A Practical Manual for Job-Hunters and Career-Changers by Richard N. Bolles (1972). It has been reissued in new editions and, as of 2009, has sold more than ten million copies, translated into 20 languages.[10]

Ten Speed has published numerous other non-fiction titles, including Moosewood Cookbook, White Trash Cooking, Why Cats Paint, The Bread Baker's Apprentice, Vegetable Literacy, Yotam Ottolenghi's Jerusalem, Franklin Barbecue, and Marie Kondo's The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up (2014). The books are usually colorfully designed. They are sometimes published in odd shapes to match their whimsical subjects. Ten Speed Press publishes 150 books a year under all of its imprints.[11]

In 1983, Ten Speed acquired Celestial Arts, (Millbrae, CA)[12] "founded in the late 1960s as a printer of rock music posters",[6] from Gary Kurtz,[13] a Star Wars producer.[14][15][16] In 2002, the company acquired Crossing Press, a publisher specializing in metaphysics, alternative lifestyles, and healing.[14]

In February 2009, Ten Speed Press was bought by Random House and is now part of their Crown Publishing Group division. Before the takeover, it published under its four imprints, Ten Speed Press, Celestial Arts, Crossing Press, and Tricycle Press, more than 100 new hardcovers and trade paperbacks annually and had a backlist of more than 1,000 active titles.[17]

Watson-Guptill became an imprint of Ten Speed Press under Random House in 2013, part of their Crown Publishing Group.[18]

Tricycle Press

Tricycle Press was the children's imprint of Ten Speed Press, which published the Amelia's notebooks series, among others. Tricycle also published Who's in a Family? in 1997 and King & King in 2002, books that addressed different types of families, including those headed by gay parents. The imprint ceased publishing new books in 2011.

References
  1. "In memoriam: Phil Wood, founder of Ten Speed Press". Berkeleyside. 30 June 2011. Retrieved 31 July 2022.
  2. Fisher, Lawrence M. (23 March 1986). "Big Books from Small Houses". The New York Times. Retrieved 31 July 2022.
  3. "A Way With Weird : Ten Speed Press Founder Phil Wood Has Made a Small Fortune Publishing Books No One Could Imagine in Print". Los Angeles Times. 8 December 1988. Retrieved 31 July 2022.
  4. Lagos, Marisa (20 December 2010). "Phil Wood, founder of Ten Speed Press, dies at 72". SFGATE. Retrieved 31 July 2022.
  5. About Ten Speed Press
  6. Brown, Steven E. F. (26 January 2001). "Full speed ahead". San Francisco Business Times. biz journals. Archived from the original on 22 October 2002. Retrieved 31 July 2022. But when they turned down a book he thought would sell, he published it on his own and watched it hit sales of 1,000 copies a day. Because the book was "Anybody's Bike Book," he called his new company Ten Speed Press.
  7. "A Tribute to Phil Wood". Ten Speed Press. 2010-12-14. Archived from the original on 2010-12-18.
  8. Cuthbertson, Tom (1971). Anybody's Bike Book: An Original Manual of Bicycle Repairs. Ten Speed Press. ISBN 978-0-913668-00-9.
  9. Cuthbertson, Tom (1998). Anybody's Bike Book. Ten Speed Press. ISBN 978-0-89815-996-7. Tom Cuthbertson was Ten Speed Press's first author, and his friendly bicycle repair manual not only inspired the name of our company, it made bicycle repair accessible for the casual and serious cyclist. As the technology of bicycles has evolved, so has his classic book.
  10. What color is your parachute
  11. Margolin, Malcolm (7 October 2017). "Berkeley Publishing in the 1970s". Sisyphus. Retrieved 31 July 2022.
  12. Walters, Ray (21 January 1979). "PAPERBACK TALK". The New York Times. Retrieved 31 July 2022.
  13. "Star Wars money buys Celestial Arts" (PDF). Starship #35. Summer 1979. p. 48. Retrieved 31 July 2022. Meredith Kurtz...
  14. "About Ten Speed Press & Tricycle Press". Crown Publishing Group. Retrieved 2010-04-02.
  15. Plaume, Ken. "From the Vault: An interview with Gary Kurtz". Fred Entertainment. Retrieved 7 November 2011.
  16. Barks, Carl; Summer, Edward; Walt Disney Productions (1981). Walt Disney's Uncle Scrooge McDuck : His Life & Times. Celestial Arts. ISBN 978-0-89087-290-1.
  17. "Random House, Inc. Acquires Ten Speed Press For The Crown Publishing Group" (PDF). Random House. Retrieved 2010-04-02.
  18. "Crown Shifts Watson-Guptill, Amphoto, Potter Craft". PublishersWeekly.com. Retrieved 2018-11-22.


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