Antoine Gallimard has just made a nice move. The boss of the third French publishing group convinced the publisher of Marguerite Duras or the 1961 Nobel Prize for Literature Samuel Beckett to join him. The Madrigall publishing group, Gallimard’s parent company, announced on Wednesday that it was getting its hands on the prestigious Editions de Minuit.
“Irène Lindon, president of Editions de Minuit, and Antoine Gallimard, president of Madrigall, have reached an agreement sealing the endorsement of Editions de Minuit in Madrigall on January 1, 2022,” the two companies announced on Wednesday. However, the financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
“I sometimes envy you to be free and to know how to be”
The operation thus puts an end to the independence of Midnight, founded in hiding in 1941 and controlled by the Lindon family since 1948. The publishing house had started by publishing The silence of the Sea of the resistant Vercors. Jérôme Lindon took the lead while this small structure struggled with financial problems.
He was then one of the greatest publishers in the history of French literature: the first of Samuel Beckett (Molloy, 1958), that of the Nouveau Roman (The erasers by Alain Robbe-Grillet, 1953), that of Claude Simon, Nobel Prize in 1985, or even Marguerite Duras, one of the greatest successes of the Goncourt Prize (The Lover, 1984). “I value your efforts and your taste. I sometimes envy you to be free and to know how to be, ”wrote Gaston Gallimard, Antoine’s grandfather, in 1959 to Jérôme Lindon, as the two publishing houses have reminded us.
“A new breath” for Midnight
“As I get older, I had to think about the future of the house, its collaborators and its authors (…) It was therefore natural that I turned to Antoine Gallimard, whose catalog and bookstores are a model of the profession and which for several years, through the intermediary of the CDE-Sodis, has been ensuring our distribution and distribution to booksellers, ”explained Irène Lindon, 72 years old. The takeover resulted in the arrival of Thomas Simonnet, collection director at Gallimard, as editorial director of Minuit. His “talent seems to me to suit both the authors of the catalog but also certainly still unknown authors who could join the house, giving it a new lease of life,” said Irène Lindon.
Antoine Gallimard, as is customary in the profession, has promised to maintain the editorial independence of his new subsidiary. “We will endeavor to bring the Minuit catalog to life with a continuity of intention. We will ensure that his privileged link with the bookstore is maintained, ”he said. Remarkable negotiator, always on the lookout, he was able to attract into his fold Flammarion, which he had bought in 2012 from the Italian RCS Mediagroup. He also took control of POL in 2003.