George Weidenfeld's last print run

From the BBC:

The publisher Lord Weidenfeld has died in London at the age of 96.

He founded publishing company Weidenfeld & Nicolson with Nigel Nicolson in 1949, after working for the BBC, and remained its chairman.

Their early successes included Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita, Isaiah Berlin's The Hedgehog and the Fox and James Watson's The Double Helix.

Lord Weidenfeld emigrated to London after fleeing the Nazis in Austria and later became a British citizen.

Having arrived in Britain with only a rudimentary knowledge of English, George Weidenfeld became one of the country's leading social and intellectual figures.

He joined the BBC World Service as a wartime political commentator, working there from 1939 - 1946.

Weidenfeld & Nicolson became part of Orion Publishing Group in 1992, which became part of Hachette UK.

Up until his death, he remained actively involved in his company and often visited its offices.

The Guardian reported:

Weidenfeld, who was born in 1919, left Nazi Vienna for the UK at the age of 19 in 1938. He founded his publishing house with Nigel Nicolson in 1949, after working at the BBC Overseas Service. He intended, the publisher said, that it “should be a serious list with a European slant”. Shortly afterwards, he took a year’s sabbatical, spending it as political adviser to President Weizmann of Israel, but returned to the firm, where he published big-name authors from Charles de Gaulle to Pope John Paul II and Henry Kissinger. Other heavyweight names he published included Edna O’Brien and Nobel-winning geneticist James Watson, author of The Double Helix.

Future prime minister Harold Wilson was one of the first authors he acquired, signing up the young civil servant’s New Deal for Coal with a £50 advance. The book would go on to become a success, but the firm’s first major hit was in 1953, with Isaiah Berlin’s The Hedgehog and the Fox.

In 1959, Weidenfeld & Nicolson risked obscenity laws to publish Lolita. “I used to make a pilgrimage to see him twice a year,” Weidenfeld told the Guardian of Nabokov in 2009, as he celebrated the firm’s 60th anniversary.