List of Famous Publishers
Updated June 9, 2017 25.9K views744 items
List of famous publishers, with photos, bios, and other information when available. Who are the top publishers in the world? This includes the most prominent publishers, living and dead, both in America and abroad. This list of notable publishers is ordered by their level of prominence, and can be sorted for various bits of information, such as where these historic publishers were born and what their nationality is. The people on this list are from different countries, but what they all have in common is that they're all renowned publishers.
Items include everything from Martha Stewart to Orville Wright.
From reputable, prominent, and well known publishers to the lesser known publishers of today, these are some of the best professionals in the publisher field. If you want to answer the questions, "Who are the most famous publishers ever?" and "What are the names of famous publishers?" then you're in the right place. {#nodes}Ranked by
- Hugh Marston Hefner (April 9, 1926 – September 27, 2017) was an American magazine publisher, the founder and editor-in-chief of Playboy magazine, a publication with revealing photographs and articles which provoked charges of obscenity. The first issue of Playboy was published in 1953 featuring Marilyn Monroe in a nude calendar shoot; it sold over 50,000 copies. Hefner extended the Playboy brand into a world network of Playboy Clubs. He also resided in luxury mansions where Playboy "playmates" shared his wild partying life, fueling keen media interest. He was an advocate of "sexual liberation" and "freedom of expression", and he was a political activist in the Democratic Party and for the causes of First Amendment rights, animal rescue, and the restoration of the Hollywood Sign.
- #324 of 388Famous Men You'd Want To Have A Beer With
- #2129 of 3,210The Most Influential People of All Time
- #78 of 88Celebrities Whose Lives You Want
- Martha Helen Stewart (née Kostyra; Polish pronunciation: [kɔ'stɨra]; born August 3, 1941) is an American retail businesswoman, writer, television personality, former model, and convicted felon. As founder of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, she gained success through a variety of business ventures, encompassing publishing, broadcasting, merchandising, and e-commerce. She has written numerous bestselling books, is the publisher of Martha Stewart Living magazine, and hosted two syndicated television programs, Martha, which ran from 2005 to 2012, and Martha Stewart Living, which ran from 1993 to 2004. In 2004, Stewart was convicted of charges related to the ImClone stock trading case. There was speculation that the incident would effectively end her media empire, but in 2005 Stewart began a comeback campaign and her company returned to profitability in 2006. Stewart rejoined the board of directors of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia in 2011 and became chairwoman of her namesake company again in 2012. The company was acquired by Sequential Brands in 2015.
- Stan Lee (born Stanley Martin Lieber ; December 28, 1922 – November 12, 2018) was an American comic book writer, editor, publisher, and producer. He rose through the ranks of a family-run business to become Marvel Comics' primary creative leader for two decades, leading its expansion from a small division of a publishing house to a multimedia corporation that dominated the comics industry. In collaboration with others at Marvel—particularly co-writer/artists Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko—he co-created numerous popular fictional characters, including superheroes Spider-Man, the X-Men, Iron Man, Thor, the Hulk, the Fantastic Four, Black Panther, Daredevil, Doctor Strange, Scarlet Witch and Ant-Man. In doing so, he pioneered a more naturalistic approach to writing superhero comics in the 1960s, and in the 1970s he challenged the restrictions of the Comics Code Authority, indirectly leading to changes in its policies. In the 1980s he pursued development of Marvel properties in other media, with mixed results. Following his retirement from Marvel in the 1990s, he remained a public figurehead for the company, and frequently made cameo appearances in films and television shows based on Marvel characters, on which he received an executive producer credit. Meanwhile, he continued independent creative ventures into his 90s, until his death in 2018. Lee was inducted into the comic book industry's Will Eisner Award Hall of Fame in 1994 and the Jack Kirby Hall of Fame in 1995. He received the NEA's National Medal of Arts in 2008.
- Crispin Hellion Glover (born April 20, 1964) is an American actor and director. Glover is known for portraying eccentric characters on screen, such as George McFly in Back to the Future, Layne in River's Edge, unfriendly recluse Rubin Farr in Rubin and Ed, mentally ill Cousin Dell in David Lynch's Wild at Heart, Andy Warhol in The Doors, the Thin Man in Charlie's Angels and its sequel, Willard Stiles in the Willard remake, Bobby McBurney in What's Eating Gilbert Grape, Ilosovic Stayne/The Knave of Hearts in Alice in Wonderland, Phil Wedmaier in Hot Tub Time Machine, and 6 in 9. He is also the voice of Fifi in the Open Season franchise and appeared in the screen adaptation of the Elmore Leonard novel Freaky Deaky. He played a German-speaking clairvoyant during World War I in the Polish-language film Hiszpanka, and an unwitting employee in service of Robert De Niro's character in The Bag Man. In the late 1980s, Glover started his company, Volcanic Eruptions, which publishes his books and also serves as the production company for Glover's films, such as What Is It? and It Is Fine! Everything Is Fine. He currently stars in the Starz television series American Gods as Mr. World, the god of globalization. Glover was recognized for his directorial work in 2013 when the Museum of Arts and Design in New York City staged the series It Is Crispin Hellion Glover. The program consisted of screenings of all of his directorial work, live performances, and speaking engagements.
- Andrew James Breitbart (; February 1, 1969 – March 1, 2012) was an American conservative publisher, writer and commentator. After helping in the early stages of The Huffington Post and the Drudge Report, Breitbart created Breitbart News, a news and right-wing opinion website, along with multiple other "BIG" sites - BIGHollywood, BIGGovernment, BIGJournalism. He played central roles in the Anthony Weiner sexting scandal, the firing of Shirley Sherrod, and the ACORN 2009 undercover videos controversy. Commenters such as Nick Gillespie and Conor Friedersdorf have credited Breitbart with changing how people wrote about politics by "show[ing] how the Internet could be used to route around information bottlenecks imposed by official spokesmen and legacy news outlets" and "wield[ing] a rhetorical flamethrower in the culture wars" by using his own personal experiences and opinions as the basis for his media career.
- Frederick Douglass (born Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey; c. February 1818 – February 20, 1895) was an American social reformer, abolitionist, orator, writer, and statesman. After escaping from slavery in Maryland, he became a national leader of the abolitionist movement in Massachusetts and New York, gaining note for his oratory and incisive antislavery writings. In his time, he was described by abolitionists as a living counter-example to slaveholders' arguments that slaves lacked the intellectual capacity to function as independent American citizens. Northerners at the time found it hard to believe that such a great orator had once been a slave.Douglass wrote several autobiographies. He described his experiences as a slave in his 1845 autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, which became a bestseller, and was influential in promoting the cause of abolition, as was his second book, My Bondage and My Freedom (1855). After the Civil War, Douglass remained an active campaigner against slavery and wrote his last autobiography, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass. First published in 1881 and revised in 1892, three years before his death, it covered events during and after the Civil War. Douglass also actively supported women's suffrage, and held several public offices. Without his approval, Douglass became the first African American nominated for Vice President of the United States as the running mate and Vice Presidential nominee of Victoria Woodhull, on the Equal Rights Party ticket.Douglass was a firm believer in the equality of all peoples, whether black, female, Native American, or Chinese immigrants. He was also a believer in dialogue and in making alliances across racial and ideological divides, and in the liberal values of the U.S. Constitution. When radical abolitionists, under the motto "No Union with Slaveholders", criticized Douglass' willingness to engage in dialogue with slave owners, he replied: "I would unite with anybody to do right and with nobody to do wrong."
