Part Three
The publishers who built French literature as a physical and commercial fact — their founding dates, their signatures, their lists.
Gaston Gallimard formalised the publishing house in 1911 from the journal La Nouvelle Revue Française, founded by André Gide and others in 1909.
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Actes Sud was founded in Arles in 1978 by Hubert Nyssen and became a significant independent voice, publishing Paul Auster's French translations and later winning Goncourts.
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Hachette launched Le Livre de Poche in 1953 at a price point that made canonical French literature widely affordable for the first time; the first run included titles from Gallimard and Calmann-Lévy.
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Gallimard's Bibliothèque de la Pléiade — thin paper, leather binding, the complete works — was launched in 1931 and makes specific implicit claims about completeness and authority.
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