“Cactus” Editions was founded in 1975 by Odysseas Hatzopoulos.
Between 1975-1991, around 2.800 books were published without any sponsorship from the state or a company or a political party or any other form of subsidy. Moreover, he didn’t take any funding from the authors of those books. This kind of ethical practice has continued until today without exceptions.
During that period some of the greatest science fiction series were publicized and the Greek readers came in contact with the work of some of the leading writers of that genre, like Arthur Clark, Isaac Asimov etc.
Being a firm believer and supporter of the necessity to bring in circulation books that talk about important events of the present, Cactus was a pioneer at publishing numerous “journalistic” documentary-books in collaboration with various famous scientists, journalists and public figures. The subject matter of these books was impactful and sensational for the contemporary reader of that time. At the same time, Cactus published important works written by great Greek (G. Scarimpas, P. Pikros etc) and foreign (H. Miller, G. Orwell, H. Hesse, M. Waltari etc) novelists and essayists, along with essays, biographies and historiographies, the most extraordinary being C. Paparrigopoulos’ work “History of the Hellenic nation” written in modern Greek.
Since 1991, along with the rest of the publications, Cactus Editions’ main purpose is to publicize the complete series “Ancient Greek Literature – The Greeks”, with future plans to publish them fully translated and with commentaries -for the first time in nationally and internationally- all the works of authors belonging to the ancient Greek antiquity. This series was awarded in April 2000 by the French University Aix-en-Provence and also in October 2002 from Pieridis Foundation, in Cyprus, as one of the greatest literary works of our time. So far it consists of 800 volumes and it’s internationally the biggest book series with this thematology. In January 2004, Odysseas Xatzopoulos presented the series “The Greeks” in Cuba during a speech of his at Havana’s Museum of Arts.
