Longman

About Longman

Longman is a British publisher founded in London in 1724, when Thomas Longman bought William Taylor's bookselling business in Paternoster Row; it has been owned by Pearson since 1968 and is now mainly an English language teaching brand.

William Taylor had been the first publisher of Robinson Crusoe. The Longman family ran the firm for around 250 years. Thomas Longman II succeeded his uncle in 1755, and Thomas Longman III, who took over in 1797, bought Joseph Cottle's Bristol copyrights with Owen Rees in 1799 and built the firm into a leading house. In the nineteenth century it published Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey and Sir Walter Scott, then Macaulay, Disraeli, Christina Rossetti and Florence Nightingale, and took on the Edinburgh Review in 1826. The firm absorbed John W. Parker's business in 1863 and Rivington's in 1890, trading for many years as Longmans, Green.

Twentieth-century authors included Stella Gibbons, Mary Renault, Thornton Wilder, Gavin Maxwell, Stevie Smith and Leon Garfield. The Blitz destroyed the Paternoster Row offices and most of the stock in December 1940. Longman became a public company in 1948 and moved to Harlow, Essex, in the late 1950s.

In 1968 it merged with S. Pearson & Son, and in 1970 Mark Longman, the last family member to run it, negotiated a merger with Penguin Books. Pearson now uses the name mainly for English teaching materials and the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English.

How to spot a Longman first edition