Methuen

About Methuen

Methuen is an English publisher founded in June 1889 by Algernon Methuen, a classics schoolmaster who first used the Methuen & Co. name to publish his own textbooks; its general list began in London in 1892 and the firm's lists were later split between several owners.

Methuen was born Algernon Stedman and adopted the surname Methuen in 1889. The firm's first big success was Rudyard Kipling's Barrack-Room Ballads (1892), followed by books from Hilaire Belloc, Robert Louis Stevenson, Marie Corelli and Oscar Wilde, whose De Profundis it issued in 1905. It first published Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows on 8 October 1908, and its children's list later included A. A. Milne and Enid Blyton. In 1915 Methuen agreed to destroy the remaining 1,011 copies of D. H. Lawrence's The Rainbow after an obscenity prosecution. E. V. Lucas chaired the company from 1924 until his death in 1938, and later titles included 1066 and All That (1930) and English editions of Hergé's Tintin.

In 1958 Methuen became part of Associated Book Publishers, trading as Eyre Methuen in the 1970s after absorbing Eyre & Spottiswoode. Thomson acquired ABP in 1987 and sold Methuen to Reed International. Reed sold its trade publishing to Random House in 1997 and the children's list to Egmont in 1998, while Methuen Drama bought itself out and later sold its drama list to A & C Black in 2006.

How to spot a Methuen first edition

• Methuen used a consistent system from 1905: a first edition carries "First Published in" with the year on the reverse of the title page, and each reprint adds a further line below it.