Henri Filipacchi

Henri Filipacchi , born in Smyrna (today Izmir, in Turkey) in 1900, and died in Marnay (Haute-Saône) on September 10th 1961, was a French editor.

Resulting from a rich person family of ship-owners originating in Venice and installed in Turkey, it follows its studies in a German college before embarking for the France because of the war against Greece. Accompanied by his mother, it settles in 1922 with Marseilles then joined Paris where it earns its living while playing of the violin in the bars of the Quartier of Montparnasse.

He marries a young Frenchwoman and starts to work in a publisher specialized in the works of luxury, the Printing works of the Book. He becomes director in 1926 about it. Its passion for the books and its work baited in the workshops of printing works, saturated with Oxide lead, will be responsible for the disease of the lungs which affects it little by little. In 1928, the couple gives rise to a son, Daniel, which will become journalist, editor and owner of the press group which bears its name.

In 1931, Henri Filipacchi joins Jacques Schiffrin, who created the Editions of the Pleiad and which plans to yield them to Gaston Gallimard. He manages to make it change opinion and then imagines the Bibliothèque of the Pleiad, which will become a collection of reference for the traditional literature. But its health is degraded and it must accomplish a long stay in Sanatorium.

Encouraged to benefit from the great outdoors, he becomes itinerant bookseller and traverses the countryside at the wheel of a truck transformed into “Bibliobus”. Its dynamism draws the attention of Rene Schœller, managing director of the bookstore Hachette, which engages it on March 1st, 1934. Two years later, Filipacchi directs the Distribution service of the company where it multiplies its contacts with the editors, the wholesalers and the booksellers.

At the beginnings of the German Occupation, the Propaganda Staffel charges it with counting the books “likely to upset the authorities of occupation”: it then draws up a list of more than thousand works which will become the “List Otto” on September 28th, 1940. With its lawsuit in November 1945, it will explain that it was constrained to be subjected to the German authorities, which had requisitioned the Transport Hatchet, and which it had been satisfied to transmit their request to the editors, which “was better capable to judge what could displease with the occupant”. The Commission of purification class the business, but Filipacchi will be isolated direction of Hatchet and transferred in 1947 to a more discrete station at the department of Exclusivenesses.

Far from remaining in the shade, it starts to think of an adaptation of the American “pocket book” . It will be “the Book of Pocket”, which it launches in 1953 with the assistance of Guy Schoeller, and which is immediately a great success, quickly reaching ten million specimens. Henri Filipacchi then imagines other collections in complement of the literary series. Reached of a Cancer for several years, he has died of a stroke on Sunday, September 10, 1961, in his house of Marnay.

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