This book is the history of a publisher's imprint and tells two connected stories: one about the personalities of a group of London publishers and the impression their characters made on the people who knew them: the other about a remarkable collection of books whose title pages bore those publishers' names over the course of four decades in the Victorian age. It is both a case study in nineteenth and early twentieth-century publishing and a contribution to the method and theory of the history of the book. The intention is to demonstrate how that history, sometimes characterized as the study of authorship, reading and publishing, can benefit from a focus on the publishers whose purpose it was to bring together the demands ·of readers with the preoccupations of authors. Charles Kegan Paul is only the best-remembered' of the publishers whose lives and work are chronicled in the pages that follow.
