Bloomsbury Publishing

About Bloomsbury Publishing

Bloomsbury Publishing is a London publisher founded in 1986 by Nigel Newton, best known as the original UK publisher of J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter books from 1997.

The company was incorporated on 30 January 1986 and is based at 50 Bedford Square in Bloomsbury. Newton, who had worked at other publishing houses before, is chief executive. It floated on the London Stock Exchange in 1994 at a valuation of about £9 million and is now a FTSE 250 company trading as BMY.

Bloomsbury took on Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone after other publishers had turned it down, issuing the first impression in 1997 with a hardback run of about 500 copies, many of them sold to libraries. Its wider list has included Abdulrazak Gurnah, winner of the 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature, Susanna Clarke's Piranesi, Anthony Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential and Jesmyn Ward.

The group opened Bloomsbury USA in New York in 1998 and has grown by acquisition, adding A & C Black, Methuen Drama, the Arden Shakespeare, I.B. Tauris, Berg (2008), ABC-CLIO (2021) and the academic division of Rowman & Littlefield (2024). It also has offices in Oxford, New Delhi and Sydney, and its shares trade on the London Stock Exchange.

How to spot a Bloomsbury Publishing first edition

• A first impression of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (1997) has 1997 as the only date on the copyright page and a full number line running down to 1 ("10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1").
• First-impression copies repeat "1 wand" in the school equipment list on page 53, and the rear cover misspells the title as "Philospher's".
• The first impression hardback ran to about 500 copies, most of them supplied to libraries.