A History of Longmans and Their Books 1724-1990: Longevity in Publishing (review)

While most of this beautiful book is beyond the Scriblerian period, the fact that the Longmans imprint arose in the 1720s, by a merger of booksellers in business during the seventeenth century, makes at least the first chapter ("The Creation of a Business, 1724-1797") worthwhile reading- and once that is begun, it is difficult not to pursue this fascinating history to our own time.

Thomas Longman (1699-1755) was twenty-five years old when he purchased the book-selling and publishing business of William Taylor in Paternoster Row. He had finished his apprenticeship a year earlier, and with a legacy purchased Taylor's enterprise for £2,300, no small sum in 1724. Mr. Briggs provides a sketch of the book trade and the areas of London in which it thrived, as well as a "pre-history" of the Longman purchase, reaching back to the 1630s, first to the shop of John Crook(e), then to the familiar name (to Swiftians) of Benjamin Tooke, father and son, and finally to John Taylor and his son William. The Taylors often appeared on title-pages with the likes of Jacob Tonson, Bernard Lintot, and John Osborne (under whom Thomas Longman had served his apprenticeship), but their major coup was Defoe's Robinson Crusoe-Longman was not given their copyright when he bought the shop. He did, however, secure many other copyrights (whole or partial shares) in the first twenty-five years of his operation, across a significantly broad spectrum of interests. One of his first imprints, for example, was the eleventh edition of William Beveridge's Private Thoughts upon a Christian Life in 1724; as Mr. Briggs notes, quoting a bookseller in the Gentleman's Magazine a decade later, religious writings accounted for perhaps seventy-five percent of booksellers' incomes. But Longman also quickly moved toward science as well as theology, publishing, with others, the prospectus for a multi-volume set of Robert Boyle's chemical writings, edited by Peter Shaw. And shortly after doing so, he acquired a one-third share in the Delphin Virgil, originally Tonson's property. This variety marks the primary characteristic of the first Longman's career—and the subsequent history of the firm as it turns out- the willingness to purchase copyrights across many fields and diverse interests.

The Longman name appears on the prospectus for Johnson's Dictionary (1746) and on the title-page of the first edition, published two months after Thomas Longman died, passing on the business to his nephew, also Thomas (1730-1797), in June, 1755. Before then, however, Longman had supported an enterprise just as vast, Ephraim Chambers's Cyclopaedia (1728); as Mr. Briggs points out, "it was described later, when other encyclopaedias had been published, as 'the original of [all] the multitudinous omnigatherums.' " Longman was the biggest shareholder for subsequent editions (five by 1746) and for the 1753 supplement. And again, always thinking "big," he joined with eight other publishers in 1729 to support An Universal History (5 volumes in 1740, a sixth in 1742, and seventh, 1744).

But perhaps the best way to demonstrate the eclectic nature of Longman's purchases (and one suspects that most of the successful dealers had the same capacity to think broadly) is that the Longman imprint (along with others) can be found on books by Hume and by Isaac Watt. He did not, however, publish the novelists until reprint editions at the end of the century; indeed, I can find only one eighteenth-century "work" by Sterne with a Longman imprint, and that is the largely forged (by William Combe) Original Letters, 1788, "Printed at the Logographic Press, and sold by T. Longman, Pater-Noster Row . . . ."

Mr. Briggs is not a theorist of the book trade, nor is he a bibliographer or literary critic. This is a social history, anecdotal and familiar, of seven generations of a grand publishing house. For our own...