Founded | 1889 |
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Founder | Algernon Methuen |
Country of origin | United Kingdom |
Headquarters location | London |
Publication types | books |
Official website | www |
Methuen Publishing Ltd is an English publishing house. It was founded in 1889 by Sir Algernon Methuen (1856–1924) and began publishing in London in 1892. Initially Methuen mainly published non-fiction academic works, eventually diversifying to publish female authors, and translated works.E. V. Lucas headed the firm from 1924 to 1928.
In June 1889, as a sideline to teaching, Algernon Methuen began to publish and market his own textbooks under the label Methuen & Co. The company's first success came in 1892 with the publication of Rudyard Kipling's Barrack-Room Ballads. Rapid growth came with works by Marie Corelli, Hilaire Belloc, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Oscar Wilde (De Profundis, 1905) as well as Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan of the Apes.
In 1910 the business was converted into a limited liability company with E. V. Lucas and G.E. Webster joining the founder on the board of directors. The company published the 1920 English translation of Albert Einstein’s “Relativity, the Special and the General Theory: A Popular Exposition”.
With knowledge he had gained of children's literature at the publisher Grant Richards, E. V. Lucas built on the company's early success. Among the authors Lucas signed to the company were A. A. Milne, Kenneth Grahame, while he also supported illustrators W. Heath Robinson, H. M. Bateman and Ernest Shepard. By the 1920s it had also a literary list that included Anthony Hope, G. K. Chesterton, Henry James, D. H. Lawrence, T. S. Eliot, Ruth Manning-Sanders and The Arden Shakespeare series.