Originally from Haslev, Denmark, Helms was a trained bookseller with experience in working in publishing and a well-known profile in the book business.
Helms moved to Sweden in 1939 to take up employment as the manager of the Danish-Norwegian department of Importbokhandeln; a position he left in 1944 to found Bokförlaget Forum on commission of Bonniers.
Other titles during Forum's first year were Hjalmar Bergman's Chefen Fru Ingeborg, Alexis Carrel's Den okända människan (Man, The Unknown), E. M. Forster's En färd till Indien (A Passage to India), The Travels of Marco Polo, Strindberg’s Röda Rummet (The Red Room), Voltaire’s Candide och Steinbeck’s Riddarna kring Dannys bord (Tortilla Flat).
[4] Subsequent titles in the Forum Library are, among others, Strindberg’s Röda rummet, Austen’s Stolthet och fördom (Pride and Prejudice), Swift's Gullivers resor (Gulliver’s Travels), Cervantes’ Don Quijote av la Mancha (The Ingenious Nobleman Sir Quixote of La Mancha), Goethe's Faust, Tolstoy's Krig och fred (War and Peace), etc.
[6] Adam Helms wanted to create a non-fiction backlist for Forum to secure revenue and not entirely financially lean on the fiction titles published.
[7] In 1947, Norwegian ethnographer Thor Heyerdahl made and sailed a raft of balsa wood, called Kon-Tiki, from Peru to the Polynesian Islands.
One of the premier artists in the country at the time, Lennart Rohde, was chosen and given free hands to create the layout of the titles, including a cartridge.
Helms wanted Solveig Nellinge as his successor but Bonnierledningen chose Kjell Petersson, an economist who had worked centrally at Bonniers since the early 1960s, as the new CEO of the publishing company.
However, the publishing house still focused on literary, translated titles, with authors such as Julian Barnes, Jayne Anne Phillips, Claudio Magris and Virginia Woolf.
[13] The publishing house Bokförlaget Trevi was founded in 1971 by Adam Helms and Solveig Nellinge, and mainly focused on the publication of female authors such as Karen Blixen, Marie Cardinal, Margaret Drabble, Gisèle Halimi, Doris Lessing, Anaïs Nin, Edna O'Brien and Sylvia Plath.
Minotaur authors include Mark Billingham, Stephen Booth, Reginald Hill, Denise Mina, Peter Robinson and Ian Rankin.