Kegan Paul – A Victorian Imprint : Publishers, Books, and Cultural History

The Kegan Paul imprint was created and its reputation for a distinguished list of titles established during a forty-year period from 1871 to 1911. Several publishers, and their firms, were involved in the development of the imprint during this period, beginning with Henry S. King and Company, and following in 1877 with Charles Kegan Paul and his partner Alfred Chenevix Trench. A financial crisis in 1889 forced an amalgamation with two other businesses and the new firm changed managers periodically until George Routledge and Son took over the business in 1911. Leslie Howsam combines biography and analytic bibliography in her study of the Kegan Paul imprint to demonstrate the value of publishing history as a contribution to the scholarly study of the book. Basing her research on intensive work in the company's surviving archives and supplemented by extensive library work with the actual books, Howsam looks at the wide range of significant titles published for the imprint. In addition, she reconstructs a biographical and business history of the firm based on published and unpublished accounts of the individuals involved, including the publishers and their families, and looks at the effects of changing business practices. The focus of Victorian Imprint – Kegan Paul is the duality of imprint: the publisher's imprint upon a list of books, and publisher's personalities, the imprint of their taste and judgment on the culture in which they lived. "Kegan Paul - A Victorian Imprint is a notable contribution to the scholarly discipline known as the history of the book. It is a detailed study of the establishment and growth of a Victorian publisher, and illustrates the way in which publishers acted as important gatekeepers in their culture by mediating between authors and readers, by selecting those texts that appeared in print, and by creating the physical formats in which they became familiar. The work exemplifies the way in which the history of an imprint can illuminate the cultural history of its time and place." "Kegan Paul - A Victorian Imprint will be of great interest to students of Victorian cultural and literary history, to historians of publishing and specialists in women's writing, to bibliographers and librarians and to all who love fine books."--Jacket Acknowledgements 7 Contents 11 Tables 12 Plate section 13 Introduction 27 Chapter 1. Henry S. King: businessman of letters 41 Chapter 2. Charles Kegan Paul, pastor to publisher 74 Chapter 3. Kegan Paul, Trench – the partnership with a reputation for serious and beautiful books, 1877–1888 110 Chapter 4. Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co. Ltd.: a financial crisis and a revolution in management, 1889-1911 164 Chapter 5. The Kegan Paul legacy: the making, consolidation and survival of a reputation for serious books 200 Notes 217 Chronology of Events 234 Who’s Who 237 Index 239