Longmans

About Longmans

Longmans is the mid-twentieth-century name of Longman, the London publishing house founded in 1724 when Thomas Longman bought the stock of William Taylor in Paternoster Row; the imprint traded as "Longmans" from 1959 and as "Longman" from 1969.

Taylor had been the first publisher of Robinson Crusoe, and the Ship and Black Swan, the names of the Paternoster Row shops, became the firm's emblems. Longman was among the booksellers behind Samuel Johnson's Dictionary (1755). Under a long line of family partners, trading at various times as T. & T. Longman, Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, Brown & Green, and Longmans, Green & Co., it handled works by Wordsworth and Southey, Thomas Moore's Lalla Rookh, Macaulay's History of England, and books by John Stuart Mill.

In the twentieth century English-language teaching titles became central, and the firm also published general books: Wilfred Thesiger's Arabian Sands first appeared from Longmans in London in 1959, and Ama Ata Aidoo's play The Dilemma of a Ghost was published by Longman in Accra in 1965.

The firm became a public company in the late 1940s and the Longman Group was formed in 1966. In 1968 it moved to Harlow and came under S. Pearson & Son, and in 1994 it ceased to be an independent company within Pearson. The Longman name survives mainly on Pearson English-language teaching products such as the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English.