Papadakis

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About Papadakis

Papadakis is an independent, family-owned publishing company situated in London and Winterbourne, UK, which prides itself on producing award-winning, high quality, beautiful books whilst working in close collaboration with authors who are leading experts in their field. Since 1968, Papadakis and its predecessor Academy Editions have published more than a thousand titles, mainly on art, architecture and the decorative arts. Founder Andreas Papadakis was the first to publish many international architects including Léon Krier, Daniel Libeskind and Zaha Hadid; and Victor Arwas’s Art Deco, first published in 1980, remains the standard work on the subject.

In 1997, Andreas founded a new publishing house, Papadakis Publisher, later joined by his daughter Alexandra who had previously studied at the Architectural Association. They worked together to develop a magazine called New Architecture, while also producing architect monographs and art catalogues. Having been long established as a leading creator of books on architecture, art, design and the decorative arts, Papadakis broadened its scope into new fields into new fields of natural history and popular science, publishing groundbreaking books that have been translated into over 15 languages worldwide.

The highly acclaimed series Pollen: The Hidden Sexuality of Flowers, Seeds: Time Capsule of Life, and Fruit: Edible, Inedible, Incredible, published in association with the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew have sold 135,500 copies in over 10 languages, and remain in print since first published in 2004. Pollen and Seeds were awarded a joint gold medal at the Independent Publisher Awards, NYC, in 2006 as Outstanding Books of the Year and Fruit was awarded the Special Prize of the Jury at the Gourmand Book Awards in 2008.

Andreas Papadakis died after a short illness in June 2008 but Papadakis has since continued under the directorship of Alexandra.

Papadakis’s first science book Why the Lion Grew its Mane was long-listed for the Royal Society Prize in 2007, and one of our greatest publishing achievements to date is The Large Hadron Collider Pop-Up Book (2013) – an ambitious and accurate 3-d paper-engineered book explaining the building and engineering of the LHC and describing the hunt for the Higgs Boson. It was published in collaboration with CERN and the ATLAS Experiment and served as the catalogue for the 2013-4 Collider exhibition at the Science Museum.

In 2013 both TeaTime and Green Universe were awarded gold medals at the Independent Publisher Book Awards, NYC. In 2015 Wonders of the Plant Kingdom was awarded Best Photography at the prestigious Gourmand Awards, Beijing, and NanoScience won the gold medal for science publishing at the IPPY awards, New York.

Papadakis has developed a strong network of authors and collaborators while also working with a number of prestigious organisations such as CERN, the Science Museum, the V&A, Brunel University, RBG Kew, RBG Edinburgh, and most recently, the Scott Polar Research Institute.

Our publishing has been described as “smashing, mad and courageous” by Simon Barnes (The Times), and authors have described their books as having a “distinctive elegance and visual appeal” (Professor Rob Kesseler, artist and Chair of Art, Design and Science at Central Saint Martins) as well as noting Alexandra’s “instinct to spot creative opportunities in unlikely places and a willingness to back them when others appear cautious” (Dr Wolfgang Stuppy, scientist).

This post is also available in: English (الإنجليزية)