G. Bell

About G. Bell

G. Bell is the imprint of George Bell & Sons, a London publisher founded in 1839 by George Bell and active under the Bell name until 1986.

Bell started out as an educational bookseller. His first publishing project was the Railway Companions series of timetables and travel guides, and the list later grew to cover art, architecture, archaeology and the classics. In 1854 he bought the Cambridge bookseller J. & J. J. Deighton, renamed Deighton, Bell & Co. Two years later he went into partnership with Frederick Daldy as Bell & Daldy; the partners took over Henry George Bohn's libraries of reprints and translations and moved into Bohn's Covent Garden premises, leaving Fleet Street in 1867. After Daldy departed in 1873 the firm traded as George Bell & Sons. Bell handed day-to-day control to his sons Edward and Ernest in 1888, two years before his death, and the business became a limited company in 1910.

The list included Margaret Gatty's Parables from Nature, the Aldine Edition of the British Poets, and work by Andrew Lang and Robert Bridges, and Bell held the British rights to Webster's Dictionary. In 1908 the firm issued the UK edition of H. G. Wells's The War in the Air, which had been serialised that year in The Pall Mall Magazine.

Robin Hyman became managing director of the renamed Bell & Hyman in 1977. In 1986 it merged with George Allen & Unwin to form Unwin Hyman, which HarperCollins bought in 1990.