John Adamson (publisher)

John Adamson (born 1949) is a British publisher, translator and writer. He specialises in illustrated books in the fine and decorative arts.
Biography.
John Adamson was born in Devon, the younger son of George Worsley Adamson, illustrator and cartoonist and Mary Marguerita Renée ("née" Diamond). After studying at the University of Edinburgh and the University of Geneva, he joined Cambridge University Press in 1974.
He held various functions within the marketing department of the Press: first as European sales representative (1975); then publicity manager (1977); becoming export sales director in 1980. During the period of his directorship, Cambridge University Press won for the first time the Queen's Award for Export Achievement.
While at Cambridge University Press he helped mount two exhibitions of humorous art in his spare time. For the first of these, "L’Humour Actuel franco-britannique. 200 dessins" [Franco-British Humour Today: 200 drawings], hosted by the Galerie M.L.R. Génot in the Marais, Paris in 1974, he "organized the British contribution", commissioning Quentin Blake to design the poster. The second exhibition "Famous British Cartoonists" was held the following year at the London Gallery, N. La Cienega Boulevard, Los Angeles, and featured only the cartoons of artists working in the British Isles. "Many [cartoons] such as those by George Adamson almost leave the field of illustrations to become technically speaking fine art," wrote Betje Howell in her review of the show in the "Los Angeles Herald Examiner".
In 1987 he was appointed Head of Publications and Retailing at the National Portrait Gallery, London, where in the course of his five-year tenure he and his team were involved in the publication of exhibition catalogues and books ranging from "Franz Xaver Winterhalter" to "T. E. Lawrence", from "The Raj" to a pictorial volume on the NPG's permanent collection.
In 1992 he set himself up as a publishing and picture-library consultant. He advised private collectors as well as museums such as the Wallace Collection, providing them with a full editorial and production service. Soon, however, he began working as an independent publisher making available an ongoing range of illustrated books and catalogues for museums, dealers and private collectors under his own imprint, as well as translating books and exhibition catalogues on behalf of French publishers such as the Réunion des musées nationaux (RMN), Éditions Gallimard, Éditions Diane de Selliers and Éditions Faton.