Publisher · founded 1848 · London
Cassell
Cassell is a London publisher founded by John Cassell in 1848, first British publisher of Churchill's The Second World War, and later absorbed into the Orion group.
- Editions tracked
- 92
- First editions
- 29
- Books
- 92
- Years
- 1883 to 2010
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.
Holding a copy? The first edition checker shows Cassell's practice for the year on your title page.
Identification
How to identify Cassell first editions
Authors
Books
Published by Cassell
- Cassell1947 Hardback Sold £500 · Feb 2022 I own The Fountainhead, Cassell 1947 Log in to want this
Spot the edition: Volume I, preliminaries and p. 610: a separate Author's Note is tipped or bound in among the preliminaries, directing the reader to an Errata and Corrigenda leaf tipped in at p. 610 (first edition, first printing of Volume I)
Frequently asked questions
How do I identify a Cassell first edition?
How many Cassell books does MyVolumes track?
We track 92 editions published by Cassell, 29 of them first editions, across 92 books.
Where these facts come from
- Cassell (publisher), Wikipedia (en.wikipedia.org)
- Churchill, The Second World War, first English editions, Bauman Rare Books (baumanrarebooks.com)
- Churchill, The Second World War, first editions, Maggs Bros (store.maggs.com)
- First Editions of Today and How to Tell Them (3rd edn), H. S. Boutell, Internet Archive, 1949 (archive.org)
Every fact on this page was checked against the sources listed. Checked 17 October 2026. Reviewed by Harriet Ellis; read how we check facts.