Conscious Author and Publisher
London
Mark Booth was brought up in Cambridge, England and educated at Ipswich School and Oriel College, Oxford, where he read Philosophy and Theology. In 1993 he moved to London and began working for Waterstones, the chain of book shops then being set up by Tim Waterstone. He co-founded the publishing division, running a list called Firethorn Press, which published inter alia several religious and philosophical titles. In 2008 his book ‘The Secret History of the World’ was published by Quercus – in the UK, Commonwealth and in translation under the pseudonym Jonathan Black – then in the US by Overlook, where it was a NY Times bestseller and subsequently in translation is many territories, including France, where it was also a bestseller. It’s an odd, ludic, slightly subversive book that he still finds hard to encapsulate several years later, but one description of it is ‘doing for history what Gulliver’s Travels did for geography’. Mark has lectured on philosophy at Maastricht University. His latest book ‘The Sacred History’ is published by Quercus in the UK and by Atria in the States. He has written articles in The Independent on Sunday on how publishing is changing, how consciousness is changing, on celebrity culture and why celebrity is bad for those who are celebrities.
