A publisher who had printed his first magazine in colour with a hand-press at the age of 14, Thomas Yoseloff believed that there was the “air of inevitability” redolent of an Ancient Greek drama about his acquisition of Golden Cockerell press.
Arriving in London in 1956 to open a branch of his American publishing firm, he acquired the lease on an office in what he described as a Dickensian building on New Bond Street, sharing the upper three floors with two sub-tenants. One was Christopher Sandford, then owner of the Golden Cockerell, a private printing press begun in the 1920s which produced fine handmade editions of British classics. Many featured wood engravings, some designed by the sculptor Eric Gill.
Yoseloff’s second sub-tenant was Sandford’s accountant, who bluntly informed him that Sandford was strapped for cash and desperate to sell. Without a moment’s hesitation, Yoseloff bought the press, although it only printed two books, and the type was put into storage until 1974 when a father-and-son publishing team became guardians of the type. In 1995 Yoseloff gave the International Typeface Corporation permission to create digital versions of the original Golden Cockerell type designs.
Yoseloff was born in Iowa and was initially a journalist supplying theatre and dance reviews to The New York Times and the Omaha World Herald. Then he embarked on a career in publishing, and became president of the publishing firm of Bernard Ackerman, Inc, before setting up his own firm, Beechurst Press, in 1939.
He was later the owner and director of A. S. Barnes and Company, and the Sagamore Press. A lifelong Anglophile, he was one of the first American publishers to open up business in postwar London, and published with Tantivy Press. He was director of the University of Pennsylvania Press and later became director of the Associated University Presses, a conglomeration of various US academic presses, including Bucknell University Press and the University of Delaware Press.
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Yoseloff also wrote a biography of Laurence Sterne, and co-authored a children’s version of The Merry Adventures of Til Eulenspiegel, as well as editing the anthology Seven Poets in Search of an Answer.
Thomas Yoseloff, publisher, was born on September 8, 1913. He died on December 24, 2007, aged 94