Note (2018): Michael Joseph operates as an imprint of Penguin. See below for a more detailed, but not comprehensive, organisational history.
Michael Joseph Limited was founded in 1935 by Michael Joseph in conjunction with Norman Collins and Victor Gollancz. Best-selling authors recruited by Joseph for the firm, which specialised in fiction, included Daphne Du Maurier, Monica Dickens, C. S. Forester, Joyce Cary, H. E. Bates and Richard Llewellyn.
Joseph sold his majority shareholding in 1954 to Sir John Ellermann, who sold it in 1961 to the Thompson Organization. In 1985 Penguin acquired the business and in June 1989, Michael Joseph Limited ceased to be an autonomous company and became an imprint of the Penguin group.
