Lexus started up in 1980, some years before the car. The company was founded by a group of bilingual lexicographers who had learned their trade in the bilingual dictionary department of Collins Publishers. At first Lexus was a packager and created a wide range of dictionaries, schoolbooks, grammars and phrasebooks (over 200 titles) in over 20 language combinations. Our customers were publishers in the UK and abroad. Now Lexus publishes its own books. The growing list puts the focus on language, language learning and Scottish interest titles. A good number of our books are backed up by online audio files.
Lexus has now launched a new imprint called Voices. The specialism: memoirs. The first title, To This Northern Shore, is written by Jean-Luc Barbanneau, sometime publishing director at Harrap. The book traces his life and experiences from Algeria to Paris to Brighton to London to Oxford and finally to where he has now settled in a small town on the Firth of Forth.
Some examples of our titles are:
Gaelic Gold and Gaelic Gold Decoder: two pocket dictionaries for learners of Gaelic.
The Maggie Midge series of illustrated stories with a smattering of Gaelic.
Illustrated Scottish folktales with a smattering of Gaelic (The Selkie, Fiddlers in Fairyland, Is that So?, Musical-Mouth).
All four Scottish folk tales are also published as single volume editions with dual language text: one English and French (Quatre contes populaires écossais) and one English and Spanish (Cuatro cuentos populares escoceses).
Mess on the Floor, illustrated children’s books in dual language rhyming couplets in French, German, Spanish and Gaelic. For more advanced learners there is Me and My Mobile, also in French and English rhyming couplets.
The Colourful Languages series of dual language books combines a little gentle exposure to another language with peaceful colouring-in. Most of them have Scottish themes: (the sights of Edinburgh in Scots, Edinburgh in Gaelic, Inverness in Gaelic and English, the Glasgow underground in Gaelic and English, a Zoo in French and English).
What’s in a Scottish Placename is a new type of placename book, exploring the country area by area and with illustrations and notes about local features. Edingow and Glasburgh does the same for two big cities. ScotlandSpeak is a little dictionary of Scots.
Distribution: You can get our books from Gardners, Lomond Books or Bookspeed. And we are always happy to ship books directly to you.
Submissions: yes please, ideas make the world go round.