Paul Elek


Paul Elek was a British publisher and the founder of the firm Paul Elek Publishers.

Life and career

Born in Budapest, Hungary, in 1906 to a family with a publishing background, Elek migrated to Britain in 1938, having "fallen foul" of the Horthy administration "because of his liberal views".
Upon arrival, he set up, together with his wife Elizabeth, a publishing firm named "Elek Books". During the Second World War, the firm published "technical and scientific books", subject areas that were popular during the war.
From 1943, Paul Elek published a number of "high-class" and often large-format books on art and architecture, including several series, Ancient Cities and Temples, The Making of History, Centres of Art and Civilization, and a short series, name unknown, of highly illustrated books on mediaeval architecture. One of the volumes, Lost Cities of Asia, in the series Centres of Art and Civilization, states that it is the first in a new series, each volume focusing on three cities, but subsequent volumes showed it as part of the original series. In many of the volumes the photography was by Wim Swaan and Edwin Smith, shown below by and.
Elek published scholarly works on contemporary history, including A. J. Sherman's Island Refuge : Britain and Refugees from the Third Reich, 1933–1939, "a study of Britain's attitudes to refugees after 1933", and The History of Anti-Semitism, a multivolume translation of Léon Poliakov's Histoire de l'antisémitisme.
He also published a number of "popular war reminiscences", including Richard Pape's first book, Boldness Be My Friend, which would save his firm from bankruptcy. That book was an account of Pape's Second World War adventures as a navigator in a Lancaster bomber that was shot down close to the German/Dutch border, and his captures and escapes.
The book was brought to Anthony Blond's London literary agency in 1952 by Vanora McIndoe, the daughter of Sir Archie McIndoe, from Pape who was hospitalized in East Grinstead, and having plastic surgery, following a drunken motorcycle accident on the Isle of Man. After being read and approved by Blond's colleague Isabel Colegate, the book was published by Elek, who gave a £600 advance. It sold 160,000 copies at 16 shillings each, and Elek avoided bankruptcy.
Elek was himself an author who published This Other London with illustrations by David Knight. He edited the anthology The Age of the Grand Tour.
After his death, his publishing interests – "Paul Elek Ltd..., London, along with its subsidiary companies, Elek Books Ltd and Paul Elek Ltd" – were sold to Granada Publishing, whose publishing interests were, in turn, acquired by William Collins, Sons, of Glasgow, in 1988.

Selected publications

The Gothic Cathedral, Wim Swaan

Castles of Europe, William Anderson

Monasteries of the World, Christopher Brooke

The Late Middle Ages, Wim Swaan



Ancient Cities and Temples

Babylon, Albert Champdor

Jerusalem, Michel Join-Lambert

Ethiopia, Jean Doresse

Maya Cities, Paul Rivet

Carthage, Gilbert Picard



The Making of History

The Age of Charlemagne, Donald Bullough

The Age of Plantagenet and Valois, Kenneth Fowler

The Age of Augustus, Donald Earl



Centres of Art and Civilization

Pompeii & Herculaneum, Marcel Brion

Imperial Peking, Lin Yutang

Venice the Masque of Italy, Marcel Brion

Moorish Spain, Enrique Sordo

Mecca the Blessed Madinah the Radiant, Emel Esin

Athens, Angelo Procopiou

Constantinople, David Talbot Rice

Thebes of the Pharaohs, Charles F. Nims

Isfahan, Pearl of Persia, Wilfrid Blunt

Lost Cities of Asia, Wim Swaan

Tibet, Land of Snows, Giuseppe Tucci

Morocco, Rom Landau

Cities of Mughal India, Gavin Hambly

Flemish Cities, William Gaunt

Rome, Stewart Perowne



Other books

The Medici, Marcel Brion

Lucknow: the Last Phase of an Oriental Culture, Abdul Halim Sharar

The Hindu Temple, George Michell