Methuen Publishing

• 1. Introduction

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  Methuen Publishing once agreed to destroy 1,011 copies of a novel carrying its own name, offering no defense in court. That retreat still raises a question the firm never answered outright: why did it choose silence over defending one of its own authors? The company grew from a teacher's side project into a name tied to Nobel Prize winners and a redrawn Belgian comic strip. Its assets would eventually scatter across bigger publishing companies. What turned a modest textbook seller into a literary institution, and why did the business stop operating on its own?

• 2. A Teacher's Side Venture

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  In June 1889, Sir Algernon Methuen launched a publishing sideline while working as a teacher, selling his own textbooks under the label Methuen & Co. The company began publishing out of London in 1892, the same year it landed its first real success: Rudyard Kipling's Barrack-Room Ballads. Marie Corelli, Hilaire Belloc and Robert Louis Stevenson all joined the list soon after. Oscar Wilde's De Profundis followed in 1905, alongside Edgar Rice Burroughs' Tarzan of the Apes.

  In 1910, the business became a limited liability company, bringing E. V. Lucas and G. E. Webster onto the board alongside the founder. Ten years later, in 1920, Methuen published the English translation of Albert Einstein's Relativity, the Special and the General Theory: A Popular Exposition. The firm had started out mostly publishing non-fiction academic works, but it would soon diversify to encourage female authors and translated works.

• 3. Building A Literary List

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  Before joining Methuen's board, Lucas had picked up knowledge of children's publishing while working at Grant Richards. He used that experience to expand on the company's early success. Among his signings was Maurice Maeterlinck's The Blue Bird: A Fairy Play in Six Acts, published in an English translation by Alexander Teixeira de Mattos. Maeterlinck had won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1911.

  A. A. Milne and Kenneth Grahame were among the authors Lucas signed to the company. He also backed illustrators W. Heath Robinson, H. M. Bateman and E. H. Shepard. By the 1920s, Methuen's literary list included Anthony Hope, G. K. Chesterton, Henry James, T. S. Eliot and Ruth Manning-Sanders, alongside the Arden Shakespeare series. One name on that same list, D. H. Lawrence, would soon bring the firm into a courtroom.

• 4. A Charge Of Obscenity

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  D. H. Lawrence published The Rainbow in 1915, and within months Methuen faced prosecution for obscenity. The firm mounted no defense, choosing instead to hand over the remaining stock. One theory points to a personal grudge. The chief editor's brother had recently been killed in France, after Lawrence wrote an unkind portrait of him. Algernon Methuen was still running the firm when that scandal broke, though a change in leadership was already on the horizon.

• 5. Edward Verrall Lucas

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  Algernon Methuen, who had founded the firm, was born in 1856 and died in 1924, the same year E. V. Lucas succeeded him as chairman. Lucas held that position until his own death in 1938. He also drew a separate salary as the company's chief reader, on top of his duties as chairman. His commercial judgment brought Enid Blyton, P. G. Wodehouse and Pearl S. Buck onto Methuen's list of authors.

  In 1930, Methuen published the popular humorous book 1066 and All That. Five years later, in 1935, the company published Daniele Varè's novel The Maker of Heavenly Trousers. Lucas died in 1938, just before Methuen took on its most unusual editorial project yet: correcting a Belgian cartoonist's vision of Britain.

• 6. Tintin And The Children's Imprint

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  Hergé wrote and illustrated The Adventures of Tintin, a series of Belgian comic strip books that Methuen published in English. Methuen insisted that any book featuring British characters undergo major changes before publication. The Black Island had first appeared in French in 1937, set in the United Kingdom, but Methuen refused to publish it as written. Before releasing the book in 1966, the publisher sent Hergé a list of 131 "errors" it wanted corrected. The story was then redrawn and reset during the 1960s. Critics later argued that The Black Island lost much of its charm because of those changes.

  Land of Black Gold had an especially troubled publishing history, with the completed adventure not appearing until 1948-1950. Set in the British Mandate of Palestine, the story centered on conflict between Jews, Arabs and British troops. Israel had already existed by the time Methuen translated the book into English, and the publisher asked for the story to be edited. Hergé used the opportunity to redraw the problematic pages, along with the pages just before them. The freighter shown in the earlier pages had been drawn from his imagination, sketched during a time of limited resources. That earlier version, published in 1950, still survives as a facsimile edition reprinted by Casterman, though the newer version replaced it everywhere else internationally.

  Methuen Children's Books operated under the leadership of Olive Jones, Charles Shirley and Marilyn Malin. One description called it "an outward-looking company whose sense of identity was enhanced by bright design, a keen marketing drive, and a strong European flavour." What came next for Methuen was not about authors or comics, but about who owned the company.

• 7. Changing Hands

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  In 1958, Methuen became part of the conglomerate Associated Book Publishers. For much of the 1970s, the firm operated as Eyre Methuen, after absorbing the Eyre & Spottiswoode firm.

  The Thomson Organization acquired Associated Book Publishers in 1987 and immediately sold off its trade publishing units, including Methuen, to Reed International's Octopus imprint. Reed then sold its trade publishing arm to Random House in February 1997. Methuen Drama bought itself out the following year, in 1998, while keeping its distribution and warehousing arrangements with Random House. That same year, Reed sold Methuen's children's catalogue to the Egmont Group, which in turn sold its UK book division to HarperCollins in 2020.

  In 2003, Methuen Drama purchased Politico's Publishing from its owner, Iain Dale. Three years later, in 2006, Methuen sold its notable drama lists to A & C Black for £2.35 million. The deals of that era set up who would eventually control most of Methuen's back catalogue.

• 8. Legacy Today

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  Penguin Random House now holds the rights to many books once published under the Methuen name, including the Adrian Mole franchise through Penguin Books. The company also distributes titles for the now-independent Methuen Books, while many of the old academic titles have moved to Routledge.

  Methuen Books still publishes new fiction and non-fiction today, alongside reprints of its older, classic titles. Classic Methuen authors include the American novelist Walker Percy, the American academic and commentator Neil Postman, and the British cartoonist Norman Thelwell. Contemporary authors on its list include Mark Dunn, Robert McKee, Michael Palin and Wole Soyinka, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1986. Mo Yan won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2012. His place on Methuen's current list suggests the company is still adding names, not just reprinting old ones.