Routledge

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Routledge, pronounced ROWT-lij, puts out about 1,800 journals and 5,000 new books every year. Its backlist stretches past 140,000 titles. The company is English and multinational, and it is claimed to be the largest global academic publisher in the humanities and social sciences. Its list covers the humanities, behavioural science, education, law and social science. Yet George Routledge founded it in 1836 as a small bookselling venture in London. How did a bookseller's enterprise grow into a giant of scholarly publishing? Which cheap fiction, family quarrels and near bankruptcy shaped it along the way? And who owns the name today?

  23414

• 2. The Railway Library

  ›

  The Beauties of Gilsland, a guidebook, was the first title George Routledge published, and it was a failure. His brother-in-law, W. H. (William Henry) Warne, helped him as an assistant. In 1848 the two men spotted a booming market among rail travellers who wanted inexpensive editions of fiction. They copied the style of the German Tauchnitz family, and the result became known as the Railway Library. Railway travel kept spreading, and the venture prospered. In 1851 Routledge and Warne's brother Frederick Warne founded George Routledge & Co. The following year brought a windfall. Uncle Tom's Cabin was in the public domain in the UK, so the firm could sell reprints of it freely, and they sold very well. That money funded a bold deal with the novelist Edward Bulwer-Lytton. The firm paid him £20,000 for a 10-year lease giving sole rights to print all 35 of his works, 19 of them novels. The series was sold through W. H. Smith's bookstalls on railway platforms. Across 50 years it issued 1,277 books, mostly as pictorial hardbacks, and some bestsellers returned as cheaper paperbacks. Its authors included James Fenimore Cooper, Jane Austen, Benjamin Disraeli, Henry Fielding, Frances Trollope, William Harrison Ainsworth, Alexandre Dumas and Victor Hugo. The partnership that built this success would soon start to split.

  79114145

• 3. Family Firm, Near Collapse

  ›

  In 1858 the company took the name Routledge, Warne & Routledge, because George Routledge's son Robert Warne Routledge had joined the partnership. A loss arrived in May 1859, when W. H. Warne died. Frederick Warne eventually left the firm, gained rights to some titles, and founded Frederick Warne & Co. in 1865. That new house became known for its Beatrix Potter books. In July 1865 another son, Edmund Routledge, became a partner, and the business was renamed George Routledge & Sons. By 1899 the company was running close to bankruptcy. A restructuring in 1902 rescued it. The scientist Sir William Crookes, the banker Arthur Ellis Franklin and the managing director William Swan Sonnenschein were among those who carried it out. Recovered, the firm began to buy and merge with other publishers, and J. C. Nimmo Ltd. joined it in 1903. Its next acquisition, nine years later, would change what kind of publisher it was.

  911124546

• 4. Turning Scholarly

  ›

  In 1912 the company took over the management of Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co. That firm descended from companies founded by Charles Kegan Paul, Alexander Chenevix Trench, Nicholas Trübner and George Redway. Their lists carried notable scholarly titles. From 1912 onward Routledge concentrated more and more on academic and scholarly publishing, under the imprint Kegan Paul Trench Trubner. It still handled reference, fiction and mysticism. The umlaut in Trübner had been quietly dropped during the First World War. In 1947 George Routledge and Sons finally merged with Kegan Paul Trench Trubner, under the name Routledge & Kegan Paul. C. K. Ogden, and later Karl Mannheim, advised the company. Under their guidance it grew especially well known for philosophy, psychology and the social sciences. The merged firm would soon be passed between corporate owners, starting in 1985.

  8124547

• 5. Passing Between Owners

  ›

  In 1985 Routledge & Kegan Paul joined Associated Book Publishers, usually shortened to ABP. International Thomson acquired ABP in 1987. Thomson kept the Routledge name and operations. It also added backlists from Methuen, Tavistock Publications, Croom Helm and Unwin Hyman. A management buyout in 1996, financed by the European private equity firm Cinven, made Routledge independent again. The price was £25 million, according to the later account of the sale. In 1997 Cinven bought the journals publisher Carfax and the book publisher Spon. Then came the former rival. In 1998 Taylor & Francis Group acquired Routledge in a £90 million deal. The Routledge name survived as an imprint and subdivision. After Informa and Taylor & Francis merged in 2004, Routledge became a major imprint within Informa's academic publishing division. Humanities and social sciences titles that Taylor & Francis acquires from other publishers are rebranded under the Routledge name. The head office is the main Taylor & Francis site at Milton Park in Abingdon, Oxfordshire. Further offices operate in Philadelphia, Melbourne, New Delhi, Singapore, Tokyo, Beijing and Taipei. The people who worked inside these walls are part of the story too.

  131415446

• 6. Editors and Authors

  ›

  Fredric Warburg, the English publisher, worked as a commissioning editor at Routledge in the early 20th century. In the 1990s the novelist Nina Stibbe, author of Love, Nina, held the same role. William Germano, a cultural studies editor, served for two decades as vice-president and publishing director. He later became dean of the humanities at Cooper Union. The authors on the list are a roll call of modern thought. They include Adorno, Bohm, Butler, Derrida, Einstein, Foucault, Freud, Al Gore, Hayek, Hoppe, Jung, Levi-Strauss, McLuhan, Malinowski, Marcuse, Popper, Johan Rockström, Russell, Sartre and Wittgenstein. Some of their republished works appear in the Routledge Classics and Routledge Great Minds series. Rival series include Verso Books' Radical Thinkers, Penguin Classics and Oxford World's Classics. The reference shelves hold a different kind of ambition.

  2221472342

• 7. Reference and Series

  ›

  The Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by Edward Craig in 1998, filled 10 volumes in print and now lives online. In 2002 came the Encyclopedia of Ethics by Lawrence C. Becker and Charlotte B. Becker, in three volumes. Taylor and Francis closed down the Routledge print encyclopaedia division in 2006. Routledge also publishes reference works from Europa Publications, including the Europa World Year Book, International Who's Who and Europa World of Learning. Many reference works appear in print and electronic formats as Routledge Handbooks, with a dedicated site called Routledge Handbooks Online. Digital collections include the Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism, the Routledge Performance Archive and the South Asia Archive. The Routledge Worlds series had 66 books as of July 2023. The publisher calls them magisterial surveys of key historical epochs. Examples include The Sikh World, The Pentecostal World, The Quaker World, The Ancient Israelite World and The Sámi World. Older series have their own histories. The Broadway Travellers ran from 1926 to 1937 under the editors Eileen Power and Edward Denison Ross. Morley's Universal Library, also called Routledge's Universal Library, appeared from 1883 to 1888. Lawrence & Bullen set up The Muses' Library in 1891 as fine editions of poetry. Routledge revived it in 1904 after L&B folded in 1900. Parallel editions appeared in the US through Charles Scribner's Sons, E. P. Dutton and Harvard University Press. More recent lines include the Colloquial Series of multimedia language courses, and the Essential Grammars, which began in 1999.

  2526293038

• 8. Price and Responsibility

  ›

  A single phrase sums up the main criticism of Routledge. Its pricing structure, critics say, will limit readership to the privileged few. They point to open access options such as DOAJ, Unpaywall and DOAB as alternatives. On sustainability, Routledge is a signatory of the SDG Publishers Compact. It has taken steps to support the Sustainable Development Goals. Its print books and journals have earned CarbonNeutral publication certification, under the Natural Capital Partners' CarbonNeutral Protocol. A firm that once sold pictorial hardbacks on railway platforms now answers to questions about who can afford to read its scholarship.

  24181920