Routledge

• 1. Founding And Railway Library Era

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  George Routledge published an unsuccessful guidebook titled The Beauties of Gilsland in 1836. He worked alongside his brother-in-law W. H. Warne as an assistant during this early venture. The pair entered the booming market for selling inexpensive imprints of works of fiction to rail travellers in 1848. This strategy became known as the Railway Library and mirrored the style of the German Tauchnitz family. The growing use of railways made a success of the venture. George Routledge and Frederick Warne founded the company George Routledge & Co. in 1851. In the following year the company gained lucrative business through selling reprints of Uncle Tom's Cabin. These reprints were in the public domain in the UK. The profits enabled them to pay author Edward Bulwer-Lytton £20,000 for a 10-year lease. This agreement allowed sole rights to print all 35 of his works including 19 of his novels. They sold these cheaply as part of their Railway Library series. Over 50 years 1,277 books were published under this imprint. Most appeared as pictorial hardbacks with some bestsellers re-released as cheaper paperbacks.

• 2. Corporate Restructuring And Mergers

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  By 1899 the company was running close to bankruptcy. A successful restructuring occurred in 1902 involving scientist Sir William Crookes and banker Arthur Ellis Franklin. Managing director William Swan Sonnenschein also led the recovery efforts. The firm began to acquire and merge with other publishing companies including J. C. Nimmo Ltd. in 1903. In 1912 the company took over the management of Kegan Paul Trench Trübner & Co. These early 20th-century acquisitions brought lists of notable scholarly titles. From 1912 onward the company became increasingly concentrated in academic and scholarly publishing business. George Routledge and Sons finally merged with Kegan Paul Trench Trubner in 1947. The name changed to Routledge & Kegan Paul after the umlaut had been quietly dropped during the First World War. In 1985 Routledge & Kegan Paul joined with Associated Book Publishers. International Thomson acquired that group in 1987. A management buyout financed by the European private equity firm Cinven saw Routledge operating as an independent company once again in 1996. Cinven acquired journals publisher Carfax and book publisher Spon in 1997. Cinven and Routledge's directors accepted a deal for Routledge's acquisition by Taylor & Francis Group in 1998.

• 3. Academic Publishing Dominance

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  Routledge specialises in providing academic books journals and online resources in fields like humanities behavioural science education law and social science. The company publishes approximately 1,800 journals and 5,000 new books each year. Its backlist encompasses over 140,000 titles. Routledge is claimed to be the largest global academic publisher within the humanities and social sciences. Using C. K. Ogden and later Karl Mannheim as advisers the company was soon particularly known for its titles in philosophy psychology and the social sciences. Taylor & Francis Humanities and social sciences titles acquired from other publishers are rebranded under the Routledge imprint. Routledge continues as a primary publishing unit and imprint within Informa's academic publishing division. It publishes academic humanities and social science books journals reference works and digital products. The company has grown considerably as a result of organic growth and acquisitions of other publishing companies. Routledge is a signatory of the SDG Publishers Compact. It has taken steps to support the achievement of Sustainable Development Goals including achieving CarbonNeutral publication certification for their print books and journals.

• 4. Notable Authors And Series

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  Routledge has published works from Adorno Bohm Butler Derrida Einstein Foucault Freud Al Gore Hayek Hoppe Jung Levi-Strauss McLuhan Malinowski Marcuse Popper Johan Rockström Russell Sartre and Wittgenstein. The republished works of some of these authors have appeared as part of the Routledge Classics series. Other works appear in the Routledge Great Minds series. Competitors to the series include Verso Books' Radical Thinkers Penguin Classics and Oxford World's Classics. The English publisher Fredric Warburg served as a commissioning editor at Routledge during the early 20th century. Novelist Nina Stibbe worked at the company as a commissioning editor in the 1990s. Cultural studies editor William Germano served as vice-president and publishing director for two decades before becoming dean of the humanities at Cooper Union. The Broadway Travellers series ran from 1926 to 1937 edited by Eileen Power and Edward Denison Ross. Morley's Universal Library operated between 1883 and 1888. The Muses' Library existed from 1904 to 1940 and again from 1950 to 1980.

• 5. Digital Transformation And Reference Works

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  Taylor and Francis closed down the Routledge print encyclopaedia division in 2006. Some of its publications included the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy by Edward Craig published in 1998 across 10 volumes. This work is now available online only. The Encyclopedia of Ethics appeared in three volumes by Lawrence C. Becker and Charlotte B. Becker in 2002. Many reference works are published in print and electronic formats as Routledge Handbooks. These have their own dedicated website called Routledge Handbooks Online. The company also publishes several online encyclopedias and collections of digital content such as Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism. Other digital archives include the Routledge Performance Archive and South Asia Archive. The Routledge Worlds series consisted of 66 books as of July 2023. The publisher described these as magisterial surveys of key historical epochs. Included titles were The Sikh World and The Pentecostal World published in 2023. The Quaker World and The Ancient Israelite World also appear in this collection. The Sámi World was published in 2022.

• 6. Ownership History And Global Operations

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  Routledge became a subdivision and imprint of its former rival Taylor & Francis Group following a £90 million acquisition deal from Cinven. Cinven had purchased it two years previously for £25 million. Following the merger of Informa and T&F in 2004 Routledge became a publishing unit within the Informa academic publishing division. Routledge is headquartered in the main T&F office at Milton Park in Abingdon Oxfordshire. It operates from T&F offices globally including in Philadelphia Melbourne New Delhi Singapore Tokyo Beijing and Taipei. Reference works by Europa Publications published by Routledge included Europa World Year Book and International Who's Who. Europa World of Learning also appeared under their banner. Many of Routledge's reference works are published in print and electronic formats as Routledge Handbooks. They have their own dedicated website called Routledge Handbooks Online. Archives of George Routledge & Company exist from 1853 to 1902 on microfilm reels available from ProQuest. Records of Routledge & Kegan Paul cover correspondence files from 1935 to 1990 held at University of Reading Library.