our company brochure.

We see things differently.
“Even before I picked it up, I knew it was a Chronicle book.”
Chronicle Books has never been business as usual.
Chronicle Books was founded
in 1967, in the heat of the
Summer of Love, when
San Francisco was the world
capital of renegade publishing.
Instead of political
manifestos or poetry
chapbooks, our purpose
was to provide the
San Francisco Chronicle
newspaper with a bookpublishing division. And
that’s what we did for the
first twelve years of our
life, producing copious
column collections and
regional guidebooks.
Then, in the early eighties, we
decided to try something new.
Instead of looking east and wishing
we were a big, serious New York
publishing house, we looked west
and captured the vitality of Pacific
Rim culture. Sushi, a paperback,
single-subject cookbook, launched
the Chronicle tradition of lush color
photography, sleek design, and an
affordable price. In a publishing
world where cookbooks were either
unillustrated or sported a clutch of
photos in their middles, the concept
of a cookbook in which each recipe
was accompanied by an appetizing
image was innovative.
That it was about a mysterious
food called sushi was preposterous.
That it looked so good and
sold so well was astonishing.
Fueled by a string of such
successes, we continued
to break new ground.
Chronicle’s list grew
enormously throughout
the eighties and into
the nineties, not only in
quantity but in scope.
Cutting-edge design books,
art books both traditional
and bizarre, literary fiction,
and pop culture celebrations
were part of this expansion.
There was a similar explosion of activity
inside the office, too. From having eight
employees and four telephones in 1985,
Chronicle became a company of over
one hundred employees a decade later
(we stopped counting the phones).
In 1991, the genre-bending
Griffin & Sabine became
an international best-seller
and established Chronicle
as an irresistible force
in the publishing world.
There was no denying it —
we were growing up.
But, we still did
things differently.
We never wanted to turn down a good
idea because it hadn’t been done
before. We began to sell books in ways
and in places that books had never
been sold. We formed a children’s book
division to deliver cool design and
innovative spirit to future generations.
We established a gift division that
brought the beauty of the book to the
world of stationery products. Beginning
with calendars, postcard books, and
notecards, we then broke through the
traditional definition of stationery to
produce guided journals, interactive
kits, and specialty decks. By the end
of the nineties, we were publishing
over 300 titles each year.
The year 2000 was millennial in
more ways than one for Chronicle.
We got a new owner who was an
old friend. Nion McEvoy, our
longtime editor in chief, acquired
Chronicle Books and became
our Chairman and CEO. Then we
published one of our biggest books
ever, The Beatles Anthology, the
only book about the Beatles by the
Beatles, and we had the fun of
watching it zoom to the top of
The New York Times best-seller list,
where it was joined by our guide
to disaster mastery, The Worst-Case
Scenario Survival Handbook.
In the four decades since the Summer of Love,
Chronicle Books has grown into an international
publisher with a signature style that’s recognized
in Europe and Asia as well as North America.
But we are the offspring of an eclectic era, and
our books show it. We’ve never seen things in
the same old way, and, thanks to us, neither will
anyone else.
We are the Chronicle of our time.
We publish 300 books and stationery
products each year. Our books hit
the best-seller lists regularly. We’re
partnered with some of the most
prestigious names in entertainment—
DC Comics, Lucasfilm, Pixar,
Nickelodeon—to publish their books
and giftwares. We provide distribution
for a variety of visionary high and
low culture publishers such as Quirk,
North-South Books, Drawn and
Quarterly, and Innovative Kids. Our
new custom publishing division gives
clients the opportunity to use Chronicle’s
aesthetic and editorial expertise to
create their own publications.
What more could we want?
We’ll tell you.
?
We don’t want to be
the big gray box that
puts out a thousand
titles a year. We don’t
want to put books on
CDs. We don’t want to
publish the president’s
autobiography. We don’t
want to be a global
media conglomerate.
Whatever that means.
“Innovative” and “successful” are two
words we often hear about ourselves.
We like them both. We work hard for both.
But we’re chasing more than innovation
and success at Chronicle Books.
We want delight, too.
It starts with the people who
work here. We get our ideas
from our employees; what they
want to see, what they want to
make —those are the books we
publish. It’s a smart, somewhat
quirky group, and our goal is
for them to love what they do.
And they seem to. They tend
to stick around. For example,
the very first salesman Chronicle
Books ever had is now the
president of the company.
We want our people to make
books they’re proud of.
We want more, too.
We want your attention. We want to
make books that pull
you across the room.
Books that catch your
eye, and maybe your
heart, too. Books that
make you look twice
and think twice.
Books that you want
to pick up and touch
because you can’t
believe that they’re
really made out of
paper (sometimes they
aren’t). Books that
surprise you. Books
that give you ideas.
Books that are beautiful.
You will see things differently.
“Chronicle does weird ideas better than anyone else.”
CHRONICLE
BOOKS