The For Beginners series was launched in the mid-1970s, but became out of print and often unavailable after the 2001 death of co-founder and publisher Glenn Thompson. In 2007, a consortium of investors revived the series, reprinted back issues, and promised to publish between six and nine new issues each year.
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.
