Ernest Hecht obituary
Founder of the fiercely independent Souvenir Press who arrived in Britain on the Kindertransport on the eve of the second world war
Ernest Hecht, who has died aged 88, was the last of the great émigré publishers and, remarkably, Souvenir Press, which he founded in 1951 in his parents’ spare bedroom with a £250 loan from his father, was still proudly and indefatigably independent at the time of his death.
A fall after a party marking Souvenir’s 65th anniversary had forced Hecht to run Souvenir from his home in west London rather than from its office-cum-shop near the British Museum in Great Russell Street, where passers-by stop to marvel at the eccentricities on display in the window – books on cats and dogs jostling for attention with offerings from Nobel laureates such as Knut Hamsun, Pablo Neruda and Albert Einstein, or Bum Fodder: An Absorbing History of Toilet Paper and Politically Correct Bedtime Stories butting up against Noam Chomsky and Michel Odent.
