Thames & Hudson creates Museum and Institutional Publishing division

Thames & Hudson has created a Museum and Institutional Publishing Division dedicated to the company’s projects with its co-publishing partners.

Among the companies partnering with the publisher will be the British Museum, the V&A, the Imperial War Museum, the National Maritime Museum, the al-Sabah Collection and the Khalili Collection.

Julian Honer, a member of the Thames & Hudson board and formerly editorial director and head of editorial at Thames & Hudson, has been appointed editorial director of the Museum and Institutional programme, which is to include exhibition catalogues and collection-related publications, as well as other projects resulting from the partnerships.

Prior to joining Thames & Hudson, Honer worked for 10 years with museums in the UK, the US and further afield in his role as editorial director at Merrell Publishers.

Sophy Thompson, publishing director at Thames & Hudson, said: “Thames & Hudson has worked with a number of distinguished museums over the years, so the challenge of meeting the combined needs of the British Museum and the V&A, with more than 10 million visitors between them annually, presented us with an ideal opportunity to consolidate and extend our in-house expertise. We have formed a robust, hands-on team, fully equipped to handle the logistical demands specific to museum publishing and whose goal is also to nurture and channel creative input from across the company to ensure the programmes’ ongoing vitality and visibility.”

Philip Watson has been appointed commissioning editor for the division, building on his work with public and private collections and other international institutions including the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, the Musée des Arts Décoratifs and the Centre Pompidou in Paris.

Other commissioning editors at Thames & Hudson will be contributing to the museum partnerships by developing titles that reflect their own areas of expertise.

Susannah Lawson has been appointed editorial manager for the division. Lawson joins Thames & Hudson from English Heritage, where she commissioned and managed their extensive programme of guidebooks to the charity’s properties that are open to the public. Sophie Neve, who joined Thames & Hudson from Scala Publishers in August 2015, has been appointed the division’s editorial assistant.

The creation of the new department follows the announcements in October 2015 of new publishing partnerships with both the British Museum and the V&A. With the British Museum Thames & Hudson will now co-publish titles relating to the museum’s exhibitions and collections, launching in May 2016 with the catalogue for the BP exhibition Sunken Cities: Egypt’s Lost Worlds.

Thames & Hudson is partnering with the V&A on titles that will explore the museum’s art and design collections. The first co-published titles with the V&A will be published this autumn.