For two decades, the “little one who has everything of a big one”, as we have nicknamed the publishing house of the daughter of Jean d’Ormesson, has been combining enthusiasm and passion, through around twenty annual publications. Meeting with her tireless founder and director, Héloïse d’Ormesson.
She is a radiant and eloquent woman who gives us an appointment under the dome of the Grand Palais in Paris, on the occasion of the book festival that held there in mid-April. Héloïse d’Ormesson published in 2005 “badly Sunday” by Pierre Pelot, very first publication of the publishing house which she founded with her companion Gilles Cohen-Solal, and to which she gave her name.
Twenty years later, the Héloïse d’Ormesson editions reached the good age, were bought by the Editis group, and maintained the starting mission: publishing less, but better. It is now a team of five women around the director: “Before I was holding the boat on my own, but today they are real pillars,” she rejoices in the Qwertz podcast of April 30.
The weight of a name
It is very difficult not to mention the name of Jean d’Ormesson when we retrace the history of the house. Not wishing to put himself forward, and unjustly benefit from favors not deserved in the sweat of his own front, Héloïse d’Ormesson first imagined giving the name “H2O” to his editions.
It is a friend editor who said to me: you have a name that is already a brand. It would be a madness not to use it. We took ten years to unravel, so don’t deprive yourself.
A daring choice that pushed Héloïse d’Ormesson to embody his editions and endow them with a real DNA: a generalist house that bets with the opening and does not forbid anything. “We publish French literature, foreign literature, more fiction than non-fiction,” she said. A few essays sometimes, including the very recent “brown flow – how fascism floods our language”, from Olivier Mannoni.
American influence
Most mostly, however, the catalog turns to fiction literature: “It is quality romantic: novels that both entertain, but raise questions”. For Héloïse d’Ormesson, entertainment for entertainment is insufficient; The book must take a look at the world and give keys: “I am one of those beings who think that the novel can help better understand the world,” she concludes.
This love of fiction as an object of reflection perhaps finds its source in the American experience of Héloïse d’Ormesson. Refusing any form of nepotism, the woman of letters chooses to go to the United States to finish her studies and work in publishing. She is in contact with the political, feminist and ecological effervescence which animates the literary circles of the time, and discovers authors and the authors that she would never have read if she had remained in France. “At the time, France came out of the new novel; I thought that we could both tell stories, and be committed. It was a bias”.
Identifiable covers
Another influence: choose covers with illustrations and typographies worked. If today the practice is very widespread, opting twenty years ago for something other than the “typo” cover characteristic of French white literature allowed Héloïse d’Ormesson editions to be immediately identifiable.
For his twentieth anniversary, the Héloïse d’Ormesson editions re -edit a novel in their catalog every month, including “Badly Sunday” by Pierre Pelot, “a breathless thriller between ‘the war of buttons’ and ‘mystic river’” to use the words of the editor. Another axis of celebration of this beautiful twenty: a monthly presence in bookstores on French -speaking territory. If the full agenda is not yet known, it is certain, ensures Héloïse d’Ormesson, that the tour will go through the Swiss booksellers.
E. Ichters / RTS Culture
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