Desmond Zwemmer

In 1976 the firm acquired Lund Humphries, another art books publisher with whom A. Zwemmer Ltd. had long been associated. In 1985 after Desmond suffered a stroke, both brothers decided to sell the whole business to Philip Wilson, a company which specialised in fine arts, and to retire.

He vigorously developed the publishing program of books on art, architecture, film, and related subjects. Discovering a market gap for a series of profusely illustrated scholarly books on architecture, in 1957 he launched the Studies in Architecture series, with Anthony Blunt and Rudolf Wittkower as the founding editors. This series was nominated by several critics as his "finest publishing achievement".

Anton sent him to Geneva where he spent three months learning about publishing from the Swiss art book publisher Albert Skira. Back in London, he would attend antiquarian book sales and in 1956 enrolled for a three-year course in book and magazine production at the London College of Printing.

He married Viera Aquino in 1952. The marriage was dissolved. In 1979 he married Ann Porter (née Beedell), a former social worker who ran a bookshop in Bristol.

In 1946 Desmond visited Paris with his father Anton where he met his father's "publishing and artistic friends", including Picasso.

Desmond Zwemmer went to school in the London area and while still a schoolboy he began to help in his father's bookshop and in 1936 he manned the Zwemmer's bookstall at the International Surrealist Exhibition in London.

Desmond Zwemmer (6 December 1919 – 8 September 2000) was a British publisher and bookseller. For many years he ran the publishing firm A. Zwemmer Ltd. which published award-winning "books about specialised areas of the arts". He also worked with the London-based arts bookshop, A. Zwemmer (commonly referred to as "Zwemmer's"), which has been variously praised by Sir Kenneth Clark who called it a "source of refreshment", by Henry Moore and by Alfred H. Barr Jr.

Zwemmer was born Desmond Anton Zwemmer in 1919 in Herne Hill, south London. His father, Anton, a Dutchman, had settled in England in 1914 and become an art bookseller, art dealer and publisher "of notable prominence", opening Zwemmer's art bookshop on the corner of Charing Cross Road and Litchfield Street, London, which "revolutionised the London art world" and, nearby, the Zwemmer Gallery which offered the British public their "first opportunity to purchase the works of Picasso and ... Dalí".