This book, the history of a publisher’s imprint, tells two connected stories: one about the personalities of a group of London publishers and the impression their characters made on the people who knew them: the other about a remarkable collection of books whose title pages bore those publishers’ names over the course of four decades in the Victorian age. It is both a case study in nineteenth and early twentieth-century publishing and a contribution to the method and theory of the history of the book.¹ The intention is to demonstrate how that history, sometimes characterized as the study of authorship,...

When Charles Kegan Paul took over Henry King’s business in 1877, Tennyson was alarmed. Trusting King, disliking Paul, and dubious about any change to existing arrangements, the poet laureate insisted that the company’s advertisements and letterhead bear henceforth the words ‘Successors to the Publishing Department of Henry S. King & Co.’. The long-lived Kegan Paul imprint was very much a successor to King’s, and never altogether lost the tone and flavour imparted to it by the man who founded the list and managed the business for the first seven years. In November 1872 the trade newspaperThe Publishers’ Circularhad...

Charles Kegan Paul’s family did not share the double-barrelled surname affected by their husband and father. They were plain Mrs Paul, the three Misses Paul and young Louis and Maurice Paul. “Kegan’ was the maiden name of the publisher’s grandmother and his own second given name. But ‘Kegan Paul’ was, almost invariably, the name by which the publisher was known to his contemporaries, and the name that outlasted both him and the business he took over from Henry S. King, as the imprint upon thousands of title-pages. (It may be noted parenthetically that Paul disliked the term ‘contemporaries’, preferring ‘men...

Trading from their premises at 1 Paternoster Square, Kegan Paul, Trench & Co. settled down to the business of publishing. Their title-pages carried the device of two trees, bound together by a scroll bearing the inscription ‘Arbor Scientiae; Arbor Vitae’ – the tree of knowledge and the tree of life. ThePublishers’ Circularin its annual survey of the British book trade in December 1881, characterized the firm in terms of the International Scientific Series, which offered ‘a wide selection of illustrated scientific works, to which additions are constantly being made from the finest writers in Europe’, but continued: ‘lt is,...

charles Kegan Paul, reflecting inMemorieson the financial limitations of his quarter-century career in the book trade, observed ‘that publishing is not by any means the ready road to wealth that many people think it is, and that it is very inexpedient for any one without a large capital and considerable literary skill to enter such a business. Supposing, however, any one to have the capital and the literary skill,’ he continued, ‘I can imagine no more interesting work.’ Paul certainly regarded himself as having plenty of literary skill: what was missing was the ‘large capital’. Henry S. King...

Charles Kegan Paul wrote a poem in 1890, soon after his installation as joint manager with George Redway of the reconstituted Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Company. The title was ‘The End of Wandering’, and in the preface to his collected poems,Ont the Way Side,Paul states explicitly that it refers to his submission to the Roman Catholic Church.¹

Except in thee I find no resting-place;

Except in thee I find no help from sin:

Beauteous thou art without, beauteous within,

Mistress of virtue, channel of all grace.

Through clouds for many years I saw thy face,

And heard...