K. Paul, Trench, Trubner & co

About K. Paul, Trench, Trubner & co

Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co. was a London publishing house of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries which, from 1912, served as the scholarly imprint of George Routledge & Sons and in 1947 became part of Routledge & Kegan Paul.

The business began in 1877, when Charles Kegan Paul, previously a reader there, bought the publishing side of Henry S. King & Co. and traded as C. Kegan Paul & Co. Following a fire in 1883 and other difficulties, it joined forces with George Redway and with the heirs of the Orientalist publisher Nicholas Trübner (who died in 1884), and the combined firm took the name Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co. Ltd. Trübner's Oriental Series, started in 1878, appeared under the new name from 1890. When profits dropped sharply in 1895, Paul and Redway lost the shareholders' backing and left.

Routledge gained control in 1912 and used the Kegan Paul name chiefly for academic books; the umlaut disappeared from the imprint during the First World War. Titles from the 1920s include C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards's The Meaning of Meaning (1923), Bertrand Russell's What I Believe (1925) and English versions of works by Jean Piaget and C. G. Jung. The two firms merged in 1947 as Routledge & Kegan Paul, which joined Associated Book Publishers in 1985; International Thomson bought that group in 1987, Taylor & Francis acquired Routledge in 1998, and Taylor & Francis has been part of Informa since 2004.