Longmans, Green

About Longmans, Green

Longmans, Green was the long-standing trading name of the London publishing house Longman, founded in 1724 when Thomas Longman bought William Taylor's bookselling and publishing business in Paternoster Row.

The Longman family ran the firm for about two and a half centuries under a series of partnership names. The third Thomas Longman took charge in 1797, went into partnership with Owen Rees and bought the copyrights of the retiring Bristol publisher Joseph Cottle. Over the following century the house published Wordsworth, Coleridge, Sir Walter Scott and Macaulay's History of England. It absorbed John W. Parker, Son, & Bourne in 1863 and Rivington's business in 1890, and built a large educational and overseas trade, and by 1901 its imprints named New York and Bombay as well as London.

Books issued as Longmans, Green include Andrew Lang's coloured Fairy Books, from The Blue Fairy Book (1889) onwards, Georgette Heyer's early detective novels such as Footsteps in the Dark (1932) and Why Shoot a Butler? (1933), and the first UK edition of Mary Renault's The Charioteer (1953).

The Paternoster Row premises were destroyed in the Blitz in December 1940. The firm became a public company in 1948 and moved to Harlow, Essex, in the late 1950s. It lost its independence in 1968, when it accepted a bid from the Financial and Provincial Publishing Company and passed into Pearson's orbit, merged with Penguin in 1970, and by 1972 the group was known as Pearson Longman. Today Longman survives as a Pearson brand used mainly for English-language teaching and dictionaries. The firm's archive is held at the University of Reading.

How to spot a Longmans, Green first edition