DAVID SALARIYA

Book Creator • Designer • Author • Illustrator • Publisher

David Salariya 1993

Salariya Book Company Stand at the Bologna Book Fair 1995. From left to right: Patricia Borlenghi, Shirley Salariya, Jonathan Salariya, David Salariya, April McCroskie

Bologna Book Fair, 1997, Patricia Borlenghi, Shirley Salariya, Jonathan Salariya, David Salariya,

April McCrosky

The Salariya Book Company Stand at the Bologna Stand 2017. From left to right: Isobel Lundie, David Salariya, Lizzie Kelly, Simone, Nick Pierce, Jonathan Salariya

Bologna Book Fair, 2017, Isobel Lundie, David Salariya, Lizzy Kelly, Simone, Nick Pierce,

Jonathan Salariya

Books, pictures, objects and ideas

David Salariya is an author, illustrator, designer and creator of visual books.

For more than four decades, he has developed ideas from their earliest sketches into books, pictures and publishing concepts for children and young readers. His work combines words, illustration, design, history and humour to make complex subjects inviting and memorable.

A Life in Books

In 1989, he founded The Salariya Book Company, which became one of Britain’s most distinctive independent children’s publishers. He created and developed more than fifty publishing concepts, including the internationally recognised series You Wouldn’t Want To Be…, A Very Peculiar History and Spectacular Visual Guides. His books have been published in more than thirty-five languages and continue to reach new readers around the world.

Today, David works across writing, drawing, painting and new publishing projects. He also writes about creativity, design, copyright and the hidden processes through which books are conceived, made, credited, forgotten and rediscovered.

Explore the work

David Salariya is a member of the Independent Publishers Guild (IPG), The Society of Authors, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts (FRSA).

Bowdler’s Children: How Publishing Makes Its Past Disappear

From Bowdler’s Shakespeare to Puffin’s edited Roald Dahl, publishing has often chosen to smooth away awkwardness rather than explain it. But sanitised texts, missing credits and silent rewrites do more than tidy the past — they erase evidence, authorship and the people who made books possible.

Inside Publishing

1 day ago10 min read

The Real Peter Pan: The Lost Boys, and One Girl

Peter Pan, Christopher Robin and Alice became immortal children. The people behind them had to carry those fictional identities into adult life. A chain of literary coincidences links bookshops, publishers, illustrators, family tragedies and two men who might have understood one another but never met.

History

5 days ago18 min read

The Loom, the Vampire to the Algorithm to AI Scraping

While writing The Short, Strange Life of Dr John William Polidori, I began to see a strange thread running from the machine-breaking of the 1810s to the current fight against AI scraping. The loom, the vampire and the algorithm may seem unlikely companions — but all three raise the same question: who profits when human skill is harvested by someone more powerful?