Kegan Paul, a Victorian Imprint (review)

Kegan Paul, A Victorian Imprint. By Leslie Howsam. London: Kegan Paul International and Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998. xxvi, 218 pp. $45.00. ISBN 0-8020-4126-4.

Kegan Paul was widely regarded at the end of the nineteenth century as a "serious imprint," primarily associated with well-designed, carefully printed, and uniformly bound editions of the classics, volumes of poetry, and scientific and educational works. If there is a suggestion of dull worthiness in this description, it is amply denied by this immensely readable book, in which the lives and personalities of the publishers behind the firm are explored as carefully as its archival records.

Howsam begins with Henry S. King, the urbane entrepreneur who started as a bookseller and publisher in Brighton before marrying into the firm of Smith, Elder and assuming responsibility for its export and banking operations, eventually setting up his own publishing business in 1871. The 650 or so new books that appeared under his imprint ranged from fiction, to children's books (Hesba Stretton was poached from the Religious Tract Society), to theological works and travel guides and included the opening volumes of the influential International Scientific Series as well as the works of the poet laureate, Alfred, Lord Tennyson. In 1874 King engaged the literary services of a Dorset clergyman and former Eton schoolmaster, Charles Kegan Paul, the husband of one of the firm's more successful lady novelists. A teetotaller and vegetarian, a passionate supporter of the rights of agricultural laborers, a broad churchman who turned to Comtist Positivism, Paul is the intriguing subject of chapter 2. His surprisingly shrewd grasp of the book trade (prompting Robert Louis Stevenson's remark, "Kegan is an excellent good fellow, but Paul is a [damned] publisher") made him the obvious choice to take over the business following King's retirement in 1877.

The third and central chapter analyzes the books and methods of the new company, known as Kegan Paul, Trench & Co. from 1881, when Paul entered into partnership with Alfred Chenevix Trench. Using information gleaned from the surviving archives (held at University College London), the 125 new titles produced each year are discussed in terms of genre, form of contract, and gender of author. Included here is a particularly useful section on the firm's series, especially the long-lived International Scientific Series, and the Parchment Library, Paul's contribution to the 1880s enthusiasm for beautiful books. Howsam explains how these "sustained literary ventures" provided a welcome measure of security against the risks involved in publishing individual titles--risks that were themselves determined by the kinds of contract involved. Paul, it appears, employed the usual outright copyright purchase (especially for "ordinary novels") and royalty payments but published more than half his books on commission. Such an arrangement, which left the author to bear the costs, was a useful method of subsidizing a publisher's activity and one that was very much more common during the nineteenth century than historians have so far acknowledged. This important discovery, like much else to emerge in this chapter, is based on a painstaking reading and analysis of the firm's catalogs, publication books, and contracts. It would have been interesting to know more about these records and what they might reveal of the financial aspects of Paul's business. How much did he pay his authors, what pricing structures did he favor, what were his profit margins are questions that spring immediately to mind.

Money was certainly behind his disastrous involvement with Horatio William Bottomley that led to the firm's merger with the powerful Oriental specialist, Trübner & Co., in 1889 and its ultimate takeover by George Routledge & Sons in 1911. Chapters 4 and 5 trace the checkered history of the new company under a succession of unsatisfactory or unsavory managers, returning to the biographical theme to explore the disappointment of the years leading up to Paul's retirement in 1895 and conversion to Roman Catholicism shortly before his death in 1902. [End...