When Basic Books Group president and publisher Lara Heimert told her mom that she was going to work at the Hachette division's flagship imprint, back in 2005, she was elated. "My mother said, Oh, they're the most important publisher in the world!" Heimert recalled.

Heimert's mother, who worked in psychology, had a special reason to admire the imprint: Freud has been a mainstay of Basic's backlist since its 1950 inception as the publishing arm of the eponymous psychoanalysis book club, which had been founded five years earlier.

In the 75 years since, Basic has grown far beyond its original niche. Today, the nonfiction imprint's academically-angled trade titles can be found on college syllabi across the country, notching authoritative spots in such subjects from classics to Ukrainian history to the sociology of race and boasting such authors as Richard Feynman, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and Timothy Synder.

"The thing that's constant is that we're publishing top academic experts," said Heimert, who previously served as publisher of Yale Univerity Press's trade division. "I think there's an intellectual litmus test for the books we publish."

The imprint has carved out a unique position in the book market at the intersection of academic content and trade publishing, thanks in large part to its acquisition strategy. VP and associated publisher Brian J. Distelberg, who has been at Basic for a decade, summed up that strategy thusly: "Focus on a few key areas, be really well connected to the experts in those areas—be out on campuses, going to academic conferences, meeting experts, really learning what's cutting edge and new—and then publish books about it."

Also inherent in this strategy is an impulse to expand. A pamphlet published by Basic for its 75th anniversary tracks how its catalog has grown from psychology, to politics, to history, which is perhaps the area the imprint is best known for today.

As a result of this expansion, Basic restructured last fall (shortly after Heimert was tapped for her current role in November 2024), teaming with three other HBG nonfiction imprints—PublicAffairs, Seal Press, and Bold Type Books—and adding two new imprints to what was dubbed the Basic Books Group: the business and economics–focused Basic Venture and the conservative Basic Liberty. The group now has 30 full-time employees who often work across multiple imprints, Heimert said.

In particular, Basic Liberty was intended to "cordon off" the books by conservative intellectuals that had become an increasingly profitable part of Basic's list in order to "correct some brand confusion about what the imprint was," Heimert said.

"I really worried that academics would would begin to think that basic was tilting to the right, and that that would be anathema to them," Heimert explained. "I wanted to keep the program, but cordon it off somewhat from Basic proper, so that Basic proper could be what it always has been, which is a publisher that publishes from all sides." All sides indeed: Basic Liberty now coexists under the same group team as the feminist Seal Press.

Though the announcement of Basic Liberty initially drew protest, Heimert emphasized that academically rigorous conservative voices have had a presence at Basic dating back to the neoconservatives of the late 60s and 70s. "We've never published screeds," Heimert said. "When we acquire, we're looking for books that are going to stand the test of time, and ... books written in the heat of passion generally aren't going to do that."

This is not to say that Basic's acquisitions are apolitical or unresponsive to their milieu. In recent years, Heimert, who acquires for Basic's history list, has been looking to more distant horizons for titles on world history and books that counter hegemonic Western narratives, mostly due to renewed academic interest in these areas.

An advantage of having expertise in as many potentially relevant fields as possible is that you're prepared for the trends before they arrive. Often, the history being made influences the history being sold. This happened two years ago, when Russia's invasion of Ukraine moved Basic's "substantial backlist" on Ukrainian history to the frontlines of public discourse, Distelberg said.

Looking ahead, Heimert said that readers—beyond just students—have a perpetual appetite for "serious nonfiction," despite recent declines in trade nonfiction sales. Some highlights of Basic's winter and spring 2026 lists include James McDougall's Worlds of Islam (January); Matthew Avery Sutton's Chosen Land: How Christianity Made America and Americans Remade Christianity (March)​; and Ian Shapiro's After the Fall: From the End of History to the Crisis of Democracy, How Politicians Broke Our World (May).

"People are obviously in escapist mode, looking for certain kinds of fiction right now," Heimert said, "but the serious nonfiction is selling. It's selling really well."