Thomas Neurath, Managing Director and Chairman of Thames & Hudson (1940-2025). I worked at Thames & Hudson for many years. It was my first office job after university (having spent a couple of years bookselling at Dillons Gower Street). When I began there as a lowly editorial assistant the offices were a higgledy piggledy warren between three town-houses on Gower Street. To put my typed-up papers on the desks of the three editors I worked for I had to go down several flights of stairs, through a connecting corridor and then up again in the next house along. There was in fact a cut through on my own (garret) floor but this necessitated going through the office of the fierce poetry editor, Nikos Stangos, who did NOT like to be disturbed. There was a picture researcher named Mark Trowbridge who had a desk in the basement where he worked away so surrounded by piles of books you couldn't actually ever find him.
I love this photo, taken by Thomas's daughter Hanna, design director at T&H and a brilliant photographer. She was my boss for the years I worked in the design department. Her picture is a nice way to remember him and goes some way to offsetting the more vivid image I have of him grumpily smoking in his office. As the Times obituary points out, his was a creative, artistic soul, and he never particularly wanted to take on the family business. After some years at the Gower Street office the company then moved to a light, airy, architect-designed space above the post office on the corner of High Holborn and Drury Lane. Unlike Gower Street it was open-plan, and I saw Thomas much more often then. In the new building he had a beautiful grand space on the third floor, with glassed-in windows so you could peek and admire all the modernist furniture and hundreds of gorgeous books (there, were, of course, gorgeous books everywhere at Thames & Hudson, not just in Thomas's office – it was an occupational hazard of working there). His everyday demeanour was annoyed, and occasionally this would erupt into yelling at someone. He reportedly once threw a chair at a commissioning editor. But he could also be kind, and years after leaving I once passed him on the street in Bloomsbury and he beamed at me with the same smile you see in the photo.
Recently Thames & Hudson moved again, to gorgeous new offices in Kings Cross. The company continues to evolve, a rare example of an independent publishing house that still has the ethos of a family. They make beautiful books with more care and attention than almost anything gets in this increasingly hurried world of ours. A Thames & Hudson book is a thing to treasure and to keep. And even though I generally found him quite an alarming individual to be around, I still treasure and keep my memories of Thomas and that era of publishing that I was a small part of.