Curated category
Book publishing companies of the United Kingdom
- RoutledgeGeorge Routledge published an unsuccessful guidebook titled The Beauties of Gilsland in 1836. He worked alongside his brother-in-law W. H.
- Hodder & StoughtonHodder and Stoughton began with a fourteen-year-old boy taking a job. In the 1840s, Matthew Hodder went to work for Messrs Jackson and Walford, the official…
- The Bodley HeadIn 1887, booksellers Elkin Mathews and John Lane opened a shop in London to trade in rare antiquarian volumes. The partners chose the name Bodley Head from a…
- HarperCollinsHarperCollins traces its name to two companies that never met until one man decided to buy them both. James Harper and his brother John founded J & J Harper…
- Palgrave MacmillanThe year 2000 marked a pivotal moment in British publishing history. St. Martin's Press from the United States joined forces with Macmillan Publishers based…
- Penguin BooksPenguin Books traces its own founding story to a railway platform at Exeter St Davids. Allen Lane later said he could find nothing worth reading at the…
- Hamish HamiltonHamish Hamilton is a name built from a riddle. The publishing house founded in 1931 carries a Gaelic nickname for a man whose given name was James, whose…
- Serpent's TailPete Ayrton established Serpent's Tail in London during 1986. The new firm focused immediately on translated European crime fiction.
- Cambridge University PressKing Henry VIII granted letters patent to the University of Cambridge in 1534. This document established what is now known as Cambridge University Press.
- Manchester University PressManchester University Press was founded in 1904, not as a publisher in the modern sense, but as the Publications Committee of the University.
- BBC BooksBBC Books began its life in the 1980s as a division of the British Broadcasting Corporation. For decades, it operated under names like BBC Consumer…
- Continuum International Publishing GroupThe year 1999 marked the birth of Continuum International Publishing Group. This new entity emerged from a merger between Cassell and the Continuum…
- Smith, Elder & Co.Smith, Elder & Co. received a manuscript in 1847 signed with a name no one at the firm recognized: Currer Bell. That name was a fiction.
- Ashgate PublishingAshgate Publishing spent nearly five decades as a fixture of British academic life, turning out books and journals on subjects from social science to the…
- Everyman's LibraryLondon publisher Joseph Malaby Dent conceived Everyman's Library in 1905 with a singular ambition. He wanted to build a library of one thousand volumes that…
- Penguin GroupThe year 1935 marked the birth of Penguin Books in England. A man named Allen Lane launched a new kind of book with a simple goal.
- Macmillan PublishersMacmillan Publishers has been shaping what the world reads since 1843, when two Scottish brothers set up a small bookshop in London.
- Osprey PublishingOsprey Publishing began not with a book, but with a packet of tea. In the 1960s, the Brooke Bond Tea Company tucked a series of military aircraft cards…
- Berghahn BooksBerghahn Books began in 1994 when Marion Berghahn founded a press dedicated to the corners of scholarship that larger publishers often overlooked.
- Casemate PublishersCasemate Publishers and Book Distributors LLC, based in the suburbs of Philadelphia, has grown from a single distribution operation into a sprawling network…
- Virgin BooksVirgin Books is a British book publisher with an unusual origin story: it grew out of a record company founded by Richard Branson, and today sits at the…
- Hogarth PressThe Hogarth Press began with a handpress that cost nineteen pounds. Leonard Woolf and Virginia Woolf bought it in 1917, set it up in the dining room of their…
- Allen & UnwinAllen & Unwin began with a transaction that would reshape English-language publishing for the next century. On the 4th of August 1914, Stanley Unwin…
- Pen and Sword BooksThe Barnsley Chronicle newspaper published a weekly series of articles about crash sites in the Dark Peak area of the Peak District National Park.
- Liverpool University PressLiverpool University Press was founded in 1899, making it the third oldest university press in England, behind only Oxford University Press and Cambridge…