They established a reputation for high-quality design and production and a fine list of English-language authors, fostered by the firm's editor and reader Edward Garnett.

Cape, with no such option, raised his share of the starting capital by selling cheap paperback reprints of novels by Elinor Glyn.

Hart-Davis credits Garnett's literary judgment and Howard's production with gaining the firm an "outstanding reputation for quality during the next two decades".

[2] The firm's first publication was widely regarded as a gamble: Cape published a new two-volume edition, at the high price of nine guineas, of C. M. Doughty's Travels in Arabia Deserta.

[2] In 1922, Cape took over the small publishing house A. C. Fifield, acquiring the rights to works by such authors as H. G. Wells, W. H. Davies, Sidney Webb and Samuel Butler.

Hart-Davis notes that the firm recruited three future Nobel Prize-winners – Sinclair Lewis, Ernest Hemingway, and Eugene O'Neill – as well as many other American writers including H. L. Mencken, Robert Frost, and Margaret Mead.

[2] British and other European authors published by Cape included H. E. Bates, Peter Fleming, Robert Graves, Christopher Isherwood, James Joyce, Malcolm Lowry, André Maurois, Douglas Reed, and Henry Williamson.

[2] The firm's best-sellers included Arthur Ransome's adventure books, Hugh Lofting's Doctor Dolittle stories, and most profitable of all, Ian Fleming's James Bond series.

[8] As the 1960s progressed, the firm successfully courted and published authors who were representative of the age, including the Beatle John Lennon,[9] and the former "angry young man" Kingsley Amis.

[11] In the 1970s, Cape published popular authors in many genres, including the novelists J. G. Ballard and Salman Rushdie, and the children's writer Roald Dahl.