Ten Speed Press

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Ten Speed Press is a publishing house founded in Berkeley, California in 1971 by Philip Wood.

Wood worked with Barnes & Noble in 1962, Penguin Books in 1965, and left a senior sales positions at Penguin Books in Baltimore and New York before founding Ten Speed Press. Wood died in 2010.

Ten Speed started with Anybody’s Bike Book which is still in print and became the book that inspired the company’s name and went on to sell more than a million copies. Ten Speed’s all-time best-seller is What Color is Your Parachute? A Practical Manual for Job-Hunters and Career-Changers by Richard N. Bolles which was first published in 1972 and as of 2009 has sold more than ten million copies and exists in 20 languages. In addition to these two books, Ten Speed has published a number of other titles, including Moosewood Cookbook, White Trash Cooking, Why Cats Paint,The Bread Baker’s Apprentice, Vegetable Literacy, Yotam Ottolenghi‘s Jerusalem, Franklin Barbecue, and The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up. The books are usually colorfully designed and sometimes come in odd shapes to match their whimsical subjects. Ten Speed Press currently publishes 150 books a year under all of its imprints.

In 1983, Ten Speed acquired Celestial Arts, a New Age book publisher. In 2002, the company acquired Crossing Press, a publisher specializing in metaphysics, alternative lifestyles, and healing.

Ten Speed Press itself was bought by Random House in February 2009 and is now part of their Crown Publishing Group division. Before the takeover it published under its four imprints, Ten Speed Press, Celestial Arts, Crossing Press, and Tricycle Press, more than 100 new hardcovers and trade paperbacks annually and had a backlist of more than 1,000 active titles.

This post is also available in: العربية (Arabic)