Cassell

About Cassell

Cassell is a London publishing house founded in 1848 by John Cassell, whose later list included the first British edition of Winston Churchill's six-volume history The Second World War (1948 to 1954); the name now survives mainly as the Cassell Illustrated imprint of Octopus Publishing Group.

John Cassell began with popular improving periodicals such as The Standard of Freedom and The Working Man's Friend. After his bankruptcy in 1855 the printers Thomas Dixon Galpin and George William Petter took over the business, and Cassell rejoined as a junior partner in 1858, when it traded as Cassell, Petter & Galpin. It became Cassell and Company, Ltd in 1883. The Victorian firm ran long series such as Cassell's National Library and Cassell's Shilling Novels and magazines including Cassell's Magazine, The Quiver and Chums, and Oscar Wilde edited its Woman's World in the late 1880s.

In the twentieth century Cassell published Churchill's war memoirs in black cloth with the volumes issued separately. Ownership changed often: Crowell Collier & Macmillan bought it in 1969, CBS in 1982, and CBS sold it in a buyout in 1986. Cassell bought Victor Gollancz in 1992 and floated as Cassell plc in 1994. It was taken over by the Orion Publishing Group in 1998, and its imprints were later folded into Weidenfeld & Nicolson.

How to identify Cassell first editions