Publisher Pierre Belfond, founder of the house of the same name, died at the age of 88, the company said in a statement on Wednesday.
Pierre Belfond died on Tuesday at his home in La Celle-Saint-Cloud (Yvelines).
In 1963, by founding the Poche-Club with his wife Franca, he had chosen to invest in a rapidly expanding niche, that of paperbacks.
After having republished classics, he had shaken up the customs by publishing in this format, in 1964, a first novel by an unknown person,
A Summer in Mexico
by Gilbert Toulouse.
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His career was marked by some resounding moves in the purchase of the rights to foreign bestselling novels, starting with
The Love Machine
by the American Jacqueline Susann, in 1971. He had success republishing the Austrian Stefan Zweig and the American Francis Scott Fitzgerald at times when they were neglected, but also
The birds hide to die
by Australian Colleen McCullough in 1979, or
Scarlett
by American Margaret Mitchell in 1991, the sequel to
Gone with the Wind.
Editor of Nigerian Wole Soyinka
He was also the publisher in France of the first African writer to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, the Nigerian Wole Soyinka.
In 1985, he became the first novel publisher to list his company on the stock market.
With successes like
Cuisine flavor, cuisine mincement
in partnership with Weight Watchers, he then claims the highest profitability in a sector that is reluctant to open its books of account.
He ceded control of his company in 1989, and left the presidency in 1991. Founder of other subsidiaries, including the Presses de la Renaissance or Acropole, he published memoirs in 1994,
Les Pendus de Victor Hugo
, republished and supplemented in 2021 under the title
Scenes from the Life of a Publisher
.
He had also led a fight in the 1980s to
"moralize"
the literary prizes, which the grand juries never granted him, preferring houses that had been established longer.
Belfond now belongs to Editis, the publishing subsidiary of Vivendi, a group controlled by billionaire Vincent Bolloré.
