We see things differently. - Chronicle Books

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Griffin & Sabine became an international best-seller and established Chronicle as an irresistible force in the publishing world. There was no denying it—.
We see things differently.

“Even before I picked it up, I knew it was a Chronicle book.”

Chronicle Books has never been business as usual.

Chronicle Books was founded in 1967, in the heat of the Summer of Love, when San Francisco was the world capital of renegade publishing.

Instead of political manifestos or poetry chapbooks, our purpose was to provide the San Francisco Chronicle newspaper with a bookpublishing division. And that’s what we did for the first twelve years of our life, producing copious column collections and regional guidebooks.

Then, in the early eighties, we decided to try something new. Instead of looking east and wishing we were a big, serious New York publishing house, we looked west and captured the vitality of Pacific Rim culture. Sushi, a paperback, single-subject cookbook, launched the Chronicle tradition of lush color photography, sleek design, and an affordable price. In a publishing world where cookbooks were either unillustrated or sported a clutch of photos in their middles, the concept of a cookbook in which each recipe was accompanied by an appetizing image was innovative.

That it was about a mysterious food called sushi was preposterous.

That it looked so good and sold so well was astonishing.

Fueled by a string of such successes, we continued to break new ground. Chronicle’s list grew enormously throughout the eighties and into the nineties, not only in quantity but in scope. Cutting-edge design books, art books both traditional and bizarre, literary fiction, and pop culture celebrations were part of this expansion.

There was a similar explosion of activity inside the office, too. From having eight employees and four telephones in 1985, Chronicle became a company of over one hundred employees a decade later (we stopped counting the phones).

In 1991, the genre-bending Griffin & Sabine became an international best-seller and established Chronicle as an irresistible force in the publishing world. There was no denying it — we were growing up.

But, we still did things differently.

We never wanted to turn down a good idea because it hadn’t been done before. We began to sell books in ways and in places that books had never been sold. We formed a children’s book division to deliver cool design and innovative spirit to future generations. We established a gift division that brought the beauty of the book to the world of stationery products. Beginning with calendars, postcard books, and notecards, we then broke through the traditional definition of stationery to produce guided journals, interactive kits, and specialty decks. By the end of the nineties, we were publishing over 300 titles each year.

The year 2000 was millennial in more ways than one for Chronicle. We got a new owner who was an old friend. Nion McEvoy, our longtime editor in chief, acquired Chronicle Books and became our Chairman and CEO. Then we published one of our biggest books ever, The Beatles Anthology, the only book about the Beatles by the Beatles, and we had the fun of watching it zoom to the top of The New York Times best-seller list, where it was joined by our guide to disaster mastery, The Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbook.

In the four decades since the Summer of Love, Chronicle Books has grown into an international publisher with a signature style that’s recognized in Europe and Asia as well as North America. But we are the offspring of an eclectic era, and our books show it. We’ve never seen things in the same old way, and, thanks to us, neither will anyone else.

We are the Chronicle of our time.

We publish 300 books and stationery products each year. Our books hit the best-seller lists regularly. We’re partnered with some of the most prestigious names in entertainment— DC Comics, Lucasfilm, Pixar, Nickelodeon—to publish their books and giftwares. We provide distribution for a variety of visionary high and low culture publishers such as Quirk, North-South Books, Drawn and Quarterly, and Innovative Kids. Our new custom publishing division gives clients the opportunity to use Chronicle’s aesthetic and editorial expertise to create their own publications.

What more could we want? We’ll tell you.

?

We don’t want to be the big gray box that puts out a thousand titles a year. We don’t want to put books on CDs. We don’t want to publish the president’s autobiography. We don’t want to be a global media conglomerate. Whatever that means.

“Innovative” and “successful” are two words we often hear about ourselves. We like them both. We work hard for both. But we’re chasing more than innovation and success at Chronicle Books.

We want delight, too.

It starts with the people who work here. We get our ideas from our employees; what they want to see, what they want to make —those are the books we publish. It’s a smart, somewhat quirky group, and our goal is for them to love what they do. And they seem to. They tend to stick around. For example, the very first salesman Chronicle Books ever had is now the president of the company. We want our people to make books they’re proud of.

We want more, too. We want your attention. We want to make books that pull you across the room. Books that catch your eye, and maybe your heart, too. Books that make you look twice and think twice.

Books that you want to pick up and touch because you can’t believe that they’re really made out of paper (sometimes they aren’t). Books that surprise you. Books that give you ideas. Books that are beautiful.

You will see things differently.

“Chronicle does weird ideas better than anyone else.”

CHRONICLE

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