of titles. Based in Harlem, the company was known as Writers and Readers Publishing, Inc. (In moving the company to Harlem, Thompson’s goal was to stimulate a new Harlem Renaissance by creating an international publishing house there. He started two new publishing companies: The Harlem River Press, publishing children’s poetry, and Black Butterfly Children's Books, books for the inner-city child). The London-based company, formally established in 1992, was known as Writers and Readers Limited. For years, Thompson spent his time traveling between England and New York to manage the two companies. In 1992, Richard Appignanesi, who had been the first editor in London for the series and had also written several of the titles, co-created the new publisher Icon Books, under whose imprint he republished several of the For Beginner titles and continued to publish and expand a British version of the series called Introducing. Meanwhile, the New York-based Writers and Readers continued the For Beginners series, in several cases commissioning new authors to create replacement books for those being published in Britain. This led to a number of examples where the two ranges were publishing two different books on the same subject. Thompson died of cancer in London on September 7, 2001; by the time of his death, the company had published more than forty For Beginners titles. Several years after Thompson died, investors decided to buy the rights to the titles, creating For Beginners, LLC. In the summer of 2007 For Beginners LLC re-released twenty of the prior For Beginners titles and authorized the first new title, Dada and Surrealism For Beginners. In 2010, the company released FDR for Beginners by Paul Buhle and Sabrina Jones, with an afterword by Harvey Pekar. See also Introducing... book series References External links Educational comics Historical comics Non-fiction comics Book publishing companies based in Connecticut Comic book publishing companies of the United States Publishing companies established in 1974