Ten Speed Press
American book publisher
Ten Speed Press is a publishing house founded in Berkeley, California, in 1971 by Phil Wood. It was bought by Random House in February 2009 and became part of their Crown Publishing Group division.
Ten Speed's all-time best-seller is What Color is Your Parachute? A Practical Manual for Job-Hunters and Career-Changers by Richard N. Bolles (1972). It has been reissued in new editions and, as of 2009, has sold more than ten million copies, translated into 20 languages.
Ten Speed has published numerous other non-fiction titles, including Moosewood Cookbook, White Trash Cooking, Why Cats Paint, The Bread Baker's Apprentice, Vegetable Literacy, Yotam Ottolenghi's Jerusalem, Franklin Barbecue, and Marie Kondo's The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up (2014). The books are usually colorfully designed. They are sometimes published in odd shapes to match their whimsical subjects. Ten Speed Press publishes 150 books a year under all of its imprints.
History
Founder Phil Wood worked with Barnes & Noble in 1962, Penguin Books in 1965, and had a senior sales position at Penguin Books in Baltimore and New York before founding Ten Speed Press in 1971.
“Ten Speed Press” enters the record as american book publisher. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Speed, Press and American can confirm, complicate or overturn.
Why this record matters
“Ten Speed Press” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Speed, Press and American provides the most credible route into that argument.
Object files, edition statements, performance records and contemporary criticism preserve different stages of the work’s history. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 1, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7699319. VIAF identifies the subject as 313305921. The Library of Congress control number is n2017061021. 3 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1971, 2009, 1972 and 2014.
Later fame can flatten the distinction between original context, subsequent adaptation and institutional collecting history. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
How to read it
Separate the work, its editions or performances, and its later reception. Catalogue records, publication histories and object files often preserve different parts of that story.
- Identifying works and editions
- Tracing reception history
- Finding collection records
The original object or edition, catalogue raisonné, performance record, rights file and holding institution.
Three-step research path
- Establish the record: confirm the title “Ten Speed Press”, its source revision and the description used here.
- Expand the search: follow Ten Speed Press primary sources, Ten Speed Press archive and Speed research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
- Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.
Questions for further research
- Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “Ten Speed Press”?
- Which edition, object, performance or recording is being described?
- How did later circulation or interpretation alter the work’s reception?
Search terms from this dossier
This entry incorporates text from “Ten Speed Press” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.