Asa Briggs. A History of Longmans and Their Books, 1724-1990: Longevity in Publishing.

Jones, Mark

Asa Briggs. A History of Longmam and Their Books, 1724-1990: Longevity in Publishing. New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Press; London: The British Library, 2008. xii, 587 pp.; US $ 110.00 ISBN 9781584562344

The 250th year of Longmans, the London publisher--1974--was marked by a Festschrift, Essays in the History of Publishing, edited by Asa Briggs. There was no 275th, for Longman became an imprint of Pearson in 1994. A History of Longmans, a handsomely produced and generously illustrated book, fit for a monument, stops just short of the demise, professedly for want of access to the Pearson archive.

Outside of the privileged university presses of Cambridge and Oxford (founded in 1534 and 1586 respectively), the House of Longman comes closest to being coeval with the development of modern print culture in Britain--a development in which it played no small part. It was founded in 1724 with a purchase from the estate of William Taylor, who had published Robinson Crusoe five years earlier: acquiring Taylor's house in Paternoster Row complete with press, stock in trade, and the famous sign of the ship, the twenty-five-year-old Thomas Longman--first of five by that name--began publishing with a partner as "J. Osborne and T. Longman." By the end of 1800, Longmans had published, independently or in consortia, "at least 2,797" titles; the house accounted for "12.6 per cent of all books published in England between 1824 and 1827" (144); and by 1989, "worldwide sales of Longman books had reached more than 160 million [pounds sterling]" (21). A list of "Longmans authors" would include Isaac Watts, Samuel Johnson, William Wordsworth, Robert Southey, Sarah Trimmer, Sir Walter Scott, Thomas Moore, Jane Marcet, Thomas Babington Macaulay, Benjamin Disraeli, Matthew Arnold, Anthony Trollope, Cardinal John Henry Newman, Robert Louis Stevenson, G.M. Trevelyan, and Richard Dawkins. Famous titles bearing some variant of the Longmans imprint include Shelvocke's Voyage Round the Worm by Way of the Great South Sea (1726), Johnson's Dictionary (1755), Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads (1800), Scott's The Lady of the Lake (1810), Bowdler's Family Shakespeare (1818), and Roget's Thesaurus (1852). Longmans also published periodicals including the Edinburgh Review, the Annual Register, and the English Historical Review.

Longmans, with its almost three centuries, appears to present a perfect case for the study of "longevity in publishing." Unfortunately, as Briggs notes, its archives have been decimated by floods, by a fire in 1861, and again by fire in the German bombing of London in 1940 (see 545-6). Even without such accidents they might not be all one could wish, for "none of the Longmans were great ... tellers of stories concerning their trade" (98), nor were their early ledgers like those of William Strahan, which "reveal more about printing and publishing than any other source" (103). Briggs resourcefully supplements the early Longmans history with other sources, such as the bookseller James Lackington's autobiographies and parliamentary committee reports. But only from the beginning of the twentieth century does the existence of memoirs pertaining directly to Longmans make it possible "to describe what was happening at Paternoster Row in non-quantitative terms" (367). The great improvement in the quality of Briggs's narrative once it reaches the later twentieth century is, one suspects, owing to the much improved flow of information. Chapter 8, covering 1968-1976, draws on in-house journals and corporate annual reports to give a compelling picture of Longmans as corporate behemoth, beginning with its brief merger with Penguin in 1970. The earlier historical narratives are patchy and discontinuous in comparison. But the later history, largely concerned with acquisitions, globalization, and "market-led" corporate strategizing, also has more limited bibliographical interest than the earlier history, where the personae are not executives and chairmen but authors, editors, publishers, and printers. Although Longmans survived as a publisher till 1994, one does not feel great continuity between the house that narrowly missed signing Byron by declining his English Bards and Scotch Reviewers because it satirized Longmans authors Wordsworth and Scott (192), and the house that managed to sell more in Nigeria than in Britain in 1976 by specializing in books on English Language Training (478). But the project of tracing Longmans through seven generations and 29 imprints (Appendix 2) is well calculated to highlight such changes. The period entails momentous shifts in technology, copyright law, contractual customs, education, and public reading and purchasing behaviors. Given the impact of such factors, Briggs is right to insist that "the history of publishing should be integrated into general history" (533). But this volume could "demonstrate" that integration better: for instance, departing from the chronological ordering for a more analytical organization would enable more concerted discussion of the technological, legal, and other relevant factors. Briggs observes that technological change had little impact on Longmans in the eighteenth century (89-96), but then his first reference to stereotype printing--of Moore's Lalla Rookh in 1851 (195)--is en passant, leaving one to wonder why, if Longmans had not used this process earlier, their use of stereotype trailed its invention up to a hundred or more years.

Occasional errors in fact and misleading references make it dangerous to rely on the History of Longmans for bibliographical precision: Boswell's Johnson was not first published in 1741 (53), and references to the Works of the English Poets (69) and to Jane West (75) are wrong or misleading in several minor details. A history of Longmans should be scrupulously clear, when it refers to books by other publishers, which are and which are not Longmans books. A reader of this History could be forgiven for wrongly assuming that Longmans had published, for instance, Smollett's History of England, Moore's Life and Letters of Lord Byron, and Moxon's Sonnets (1830-1835) (61, 193, 196). The omission of a bibliography, or even a list of works cited, is disappointing in a book of this kind, particularly given that its inclusion would help check errors and settle ambiguities introduced elsewhere.

MARK JONES

Queen's University