AustLit

Wishart and Company was founded in London in 1935 by Ernest Edward Wishart and Douglas Garman. A liberal and anti-fascist press, its first work was the leftist literary journal Calendar of Modern Letters (1925-1927). In 1934 it published Negro, a mammoth anthology of black culture.

In 1935 Wishart merged with Martin Lawrence, the publishing arm of the Communist Party of Great Britain, and became Lawrence and Wishart. In 1975 the company brought out, in fifty volumes, the complete works of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in English. Since the 1990s it has been largely a publisher of journals in the area of contemporary political culture.