Anthony Cheetham's memoir of 58-year publishing career goes to Head of Zeus

Head of Zeus is publishing Anthony Cheetham’s memoir of his 58-year career at the heart of the UK publishing industry, A Life in 50 Books.

Richard Milbank, publishing director, acquired world all language rights for Head of Zeus from Georgina Capel at Georgina Capel Associates. The book will be published in hardback and e-book under their Apollo Non-Fiction imprint, on 13th March 2025.

Head of Zeus, part of Bloomsbury, dubbed Cheetham’s career as one in which "he shaped the landscape of post-war British publishing to a significant degree, having established such enduringly successful companies and imprints as Century, Orion, Quercus, Head of Zeus, Abacus and Vintage".

The blurb for A Life in 50 Books reads: "Starting with Homer’s Odyssey and ending with works by the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins and the German historian Ernst Kantorowicz, Anthony Cheetham has selected 50 books as mileposts with which to map the course of his long and productive career.

"Many of these are titles that he himself published (Dune, The Thorn Birds, A Suitable Boy, Meetings with Remarkable Trees, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo); some are books he wished he had published (Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time); others are simply masterworks that left an indelible mark on him (The Lord of the Rings, War and Peace).

"Rich in encounters with remarkable individuals, and embellished with beautiful photographs of book jackets from the 1950s to the present day, A Life in 50 Books is a sharply and entertainingly written survey of an industry."

Cheetham was born in Mexico City and educated at Eton and Balliol College, Oxford, where he read modern history. Over the course of a 58-year career in book publishing, he has established many of the UK’s most prominent publishing companies including Century, Orion, Quercus and Head of Zeus. He lives in London and Gloucestershire.