The House of Cassell, 1848-1958

Cassell & Co. Ltd., London, first edition, 1958. Cloth, 8vo, 26 cm,. 299 pp, ills. From the blurb: "The Story of the House of Cassell during the hundred years which passed [before] the publication of Sir Winston . Churchill's great work A History of the English-Speaking Peoples is in itself a chapter of England's social life. For there is no more reliable index of the development of a society than that provided by thechanging character of its literature, and the growth of its popular education. It is a story with which many of the famous names of the past hundred years of English literature have been associated. Wilkie Collins, Charles Reade, Dean Farrar, R. L. Stevenson, Rider Haggard, W. E. Henley, Conan Doyle, Oscar Wilde, Olive Schreiner, Marie Corelli, Ouida, Max Pemberton, Bret Harte, Jerome K. Jerome, J. M. Barrie, Somerset Maugham, G. K. Chesterton, H. G. Wells, Arnold Bennett, Rudyard Kipling, and Hilaire Belloc were all connected with the Company. It is a story of success and setbacks. In its first thirty-five years, the House of Cassell grew to so prominent a position that its printing works at La Belle Sauvage were acknowledged to be the largest and most up to date in thè world. In 1941, in the last German attacks on London, the whole of La Belle Sauvage was reduced to a mass of rubble. The fluctuations of literary taste through a century of revolutionary change are reflected in its successes and its failures, and signposted by the writers who came to Cassell's. Many of them were already famous; but many were at the time quite unknown. All have helped in an author-publisher partnership which has, one may say without immodesty, played a not inconsiderable part in this country's literary and social life during the past one hundred and ten years. Endpapers mildly yellowed, otherwise Good in a price-clipped dustwrapper chipped with small loss.