Books in the Attic

About Us
2013

Books in the Attic (Sifrey Aliyat Hagag in Hebrew) is a family-owned, small, independent, quality publishing house. It was founded twenty years ago in Tel-Aviv by Dr. Yehuda Melzer, who taught philosophy at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and at Tel Aviv University before launching his first publishing firm (Adam Books) and becoming a full-time publisher. At Books in the Attic Yehuda was later joined by his son, Ilai, who now runs the company, while Yehuda serves as editor-in-chief.

Books in the Attic is fully independent and deliberately small but at the same time enjoys an advantageous arrangement: we publish almost all our titles with Yedioth Books, the book division of Yedioth Ahronoth, the biggest media conglomerate in Israel. They handle the marketing, sales, storage, and distribution of our books. This successful affiliation has allowed us to remain an intimate operation and to dedicate our efforts exclusively to the creative and editorial process.  

Twenty years ago the company burst onto the scene with a best-selling series of medical guides for the general public (today this content is fully digitized in our pioneering Hebrew medical website www.infomed.co.il). We now are known for publishing a wide range of fiction and non-fiction titles, most of which are translations (from English, French, Russian, Greek, Italian, Spanish, as well as classical Greek and Latin). Here is a sample of our genres and some prominent authors:

Philosophy – Plato, St. Augustine, Descartes, Kant, Mill, Kuhn, Rawls

Popular Science – Simon Singh, Marcus Du Sautoy, Steve Jones, Richard Dawkins, Dixit and Nalebuff, James Watson, David Harel, John Gribbin, Jim Baggott, Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw, Oren Harman

Fiction – Dostoyevsky, Bulgakov, Stephen Zweig, Joseph Heller, Robert Graves, Barrico, Leonardo Padura, Apostolos Doxiadis, Kostas Mourselas, J.K. Rowling

Contemporary Novels – Boris Akunin's Fandorin Series, Stef Penny's The Tenderness of Wolves, Daniel Kehlmann's Die Vermessung der Welt, Emma Donoghue's Room, J.K. Rowling's The Casual Vacancy

General Non-Fiction – Janet Malcolm, Daniel Mendelsohn, Misha Glenny, Raymond Aron, Christopher Browning, Robert Paxton, Anthony Gottlieb, Nassim Taleb, William Styron (Darkness Visible), Douglas Adams (Last Chance to See), Janet Browne, Raja Shehade, Masha Gessen, Sylvia Nasar, Allen Frances

Biographies – of Marx (Wheen), Freud, Shakespeare (Greenblatt), Wittgenstein-Popper, Pushkin (Serena Vitale), Muhammad Ali (Remnick) Einstein (Walter Isaacson)

Children's and YA Books – William Steig, Shel Silverstein, Ernst Gombrich's best-selling A Little History of the World, the Geronimo Stilton Series, Night School and Harry Potter.

Poetry – Sophocles (Antigone, Oedipus), Mayakovski      

  Finally, and very selectively, we do publish some Hebrew authors. Our most successful original titles are the best-selling novels by award-winning author Haim Sabbato, Assaf Gavron (The Hilltop) and the non-fiction titles by historian Aviad Kleinberg and astrophysicist Hagai Netzer. One of our most recent Hebrew titles is a critical essay by Shaul Arieli and Michael Sfard about Israel's wall in the West Bank.

 Recently, the ranks of our salaried employees (as opposed to our many wonderful freelancing friends) have dramatically swollen – from two to three! – with the joining of Hanan Elstein, an editor who specializes in German literature. Among the authors he has acquired and edited are Kehlmann, Kevin Vennemann and Marcel Beyer.