Following Gerald Duckworth's death in 1937, control of the company passed to Mervyn Horder and Patrick Crichton-Smith. The company, heavily in debt after the Great Depression, suffered the loss of "its entire stock of unbound sheets" as the result of bomb damage during the Second World War. From 1945 until the 1970s the firm published authors such Simone de Beauvoir, Charlotte Mew and Evelyn Waugh.[3]
In 1968, Gerard Duckworth & Co. was purchased by Colin Haycraft and a friend Tim Simon.[4] Haycraft would run the company until his death in 1994. In this period Haycraft was described as a "one man university press" publishing at Duckworth a "body of works on Greek and Roman literature, philosophy and society" whose scholarship and originality "equalled the output of the large university houses". Meanwhile his wife, the writer Alice Thomas Ellis, was Duckworth's fiction editor and was responsible for publishing "Duckworth's best-selling author", Beryl Bainbridge.
The company moved from Henrietta Street to The Old Piano Factory in Camden, North London, on Old Gloucester Street, made famous by Alan Bennett in his bestselling book, The Lady in the Van.[citation needed]
After Mayer's death in 2018, Duckworth was sold to Prelude Books and is now operated under the leadership of Pete Duncan and Matt Casbourne.[10][3] Prelude Books rebranded itself under the name Duckworth Books and as of 2020 the company has been operating from an office in Richmond-upon-Thames[3] with a focus on publishing non-fiction and historical fiction.
