Desmond Zwemmer  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 ... Dali". 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. In those years he would visit European countries to view great works of architecture, always with "the relevant volumes of Pevsner" in hand. With much of the art book trade based in Paris, a fluent knowledge of French was essential for publishers and booksellers of art books and so he attended the University of Besançon for a year, after which he returned to London and studied art history at the Courtauld Institute under Anthony Blunt. During World War II he was called up and was posted as an army officer to the North-West Frontier Province, the Lebanon and post-war Germany. In 1946 Desmond visited Paris with his father Anton where he met his father's "publishing and artistic friends", including Picasso. 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. Desmond undertook an increasing role in his father's publishing activities (under the imprint of "A. Zwemmer Ltd.") while his younger brother John concentrated on the new and antiquarian bookselling side of their father's business.