Along with George Weidenfeld, Walter Neurath, (co-founder with his wife Eva of Thames & Hudson), and Paul Hamlyn, Elly Miller was one of the many Jewish refugees who had a huge impact on British publishing after the war. During a career of over 60 years, she helped transform art books in this country.
Elly Miller was born in Vienna in 1928, the second of three children of Béla Horovitz (1898-1955) and Lotte, née Beller (1905-2003). Her Hebrew name was Esther because she was born on Purim. Her brother Joseph (1926) became a well-known composer and a professor at the Royal College of Music, and her younger sister Hannah (1936-2010) became a concert agent and impresario.
The Horovitz family lived on the Parkring facing the Stadtpark, in the heart of Vienna. Elly’s maternal grandparents lived next door. Elly grew up in a cultured home; her father could quote in Latin and Greek and her parents were both deeply religious and were involved in Viennese music and fine arts.
Her father and Ludwig Goldscheider, a friend from school, co-founded Phaidon Verlag in 1923. They published some of Austria’s leading writers, including Stefan Zweig, Robert Neumann, Joseph Roth and Arthur Schnitzler. Phaidon’s first books were editions of classical literature and poetry but they moved on to illustrated cultural history; Jacob Burckhardt on the Renaissance and Theodor Mommsen on Rome, and then to art publishing. Phaidon revolutionised the genre, introducing the work of famous artists in handsome editions to a wide audience at a low price.
The Horovitz family immediately left Vienna after the Anschluss in March, 1938 and escaped to London after an extraordinary journey across Europe. Elly’s first homes were in Lyndhurst Road, Hampstead, Bath (where her father was briefly reunited with his old friend, the Austrian writer and anti-nationalist, Stefan Zweig) and Oxford, where the family spent most of the war and where she attended Oxford Girls High School from 1941-46.
Their greatest success after the war was The Story of Art (1950), by Ernst Gombrich, which became an international bestseller. Elly played an important part in its genesis. Her father asked her, at the age of 16, if she would recommend it. She did and the rest is history. It became one of the most famous art history books of the 20th century and established Phaidon’s reputation for publishing beautifully produced books of the highest scholarly standards, aimed at a popular audience. It has sold over seven million copies and has been constantly in print for 70 years.
Elly studied PPE at Somerville College in Oxford and worked briefly at Oxford University Press in New York. In 1950 she married Harvey Miller (1925-2008). They were married for almost 60 years and had three children, Dorothy, Tamar and Malcolm. It was an exceptionally close-knit family, who gathered for family celebrations at Elly and Harvey’s home in Wimbledon and later at her apartment in Primrose Hill.
She was a gifted pianist, wrote and translated poetry and chaired the South-West London group of the Friends of the Hebrew University, organising talks and recitals to support the HU Library (now the National Library of Israel). She was also a loyal member of the Chelsea Synagogue. A devout and deeply cultured family, they and Béla’s widow, Lotte, brought the best of interwar Vienna to London.
In 1950 Elly joined Phaidon Press. Her father died of a heart attack in 1955. After his death Elly and her husband Harvey ran Phaidon together, finally selling it in 1967. She had learned much about book production from Ludwig Goldscheider and continued his tradition. Publishing was still very much a man’s world in the 1950s and 1960s and she played a significant role, editing and designing major books such as Berenson’s essays on Italian Renaissance painters, Anthony Blunt’s Windsor collection of Old Master drawings and Kenneth Clark’s Piero della Francesca.
In 1968 she and her husband started their own publishing company, Harvey Miller Publishers, specialising in art and medicine. It continued the distinctive mix of high-quality scholarship and beautiful production, that had been the hallmark of Phaidon for almost half a century. They championed new studies in Renaissance and Medieval art, Elly’s special passion. Since 2000 it has been an imprint of the international publishing house Brepols.
After Harvey’s death, Elly continued to commission, edit, design and publish her books with scrupulous care. Art publishing was more than just a career for her. It was her life. She never retired and worked with tremendous energy right until the end of her life. When she went into hospital she still had three manuscripts on her desk that she was working on.
In an interview with her daughter-in-law Dr Bea Lewkowicz, she spoke of what she had learned from her parents; a mix of Jewish tradition and Jewish ethics but also classical learning and philosophy. At her shiva a publishing colleague said: “Who else has worked with Gombrich, spoken with Toscanini as a young girl and knew Thomas Mann as a family acquaintance?”
Elly Miller is survived by her three children, their families and her brother Joseph, the last surviving member of the extraordinary Horovitz family who came from Vienna after the Anschluss and did so much to enrich British culture.
David herman
Elly Miller: born March, 5 1928. Died August 8, 2020
