The History of John Murray (Publishers)
John Murray, a lieutenant in the Marines, had no experience in publishing, but a good business head, when he acquired a bookselling and publishing business in Fleet Street in 1768. One of the first publishers to pay attention to the quality of the writing of his authors, he exploited his contacts to sell substantial quantities of his books (and indeed game, paste jewels and lottery tickets on occasion).
His son, John Murray II, began to shape the business as we now know it: he signed Walter Scott, and with his help launched The Quarterly Review. In 1812 he published Byron’s Childe Harold to astonishing success – emboldening him to mortgage his copyrights to buy 50 Albemarle Street, home of the publishing house for nearly two hundred years.
The drawing room at Albemarle Street became the meeting place for the most brilliant circle in English literary history. By the time of Waterloo, everyone wanted to be published by Murray, one of the first being Jane Austen, with Emma. She was not named as the author of that book (nor the two that followed for Murray) until after her death.
The nineteenth century saw the birth of the great travel list, starting with the distinctive Murray Handbooks, and leading on through the great explorers, including Franklin, Livingstone, Barrow, Schliemann and Isabella Bird. Scientists and inventors chose to publish through Murray, amongst them Charles Babbage, Malthus and Lyell, whose 1830 Principles of Geology lit the fuse that led to Darwin. In 1859 the firm pulled off a remarkable feat in publishing Darwin’s On the Origin of Species and Samuel Smiles’s Self-Help, two bestsellers on the same day. Even Darwin’s last book, a monograph on earthworms published in 1881, went through six editions in its first year. John Murray III was one of the official publishers to the Great Exhibition, a link which stood John Murrays in good stead when it faced down royal protocol in publishing Queen Victoria’s letters after her death.
The acquisition of rival publisher Smith, Elder in 1917 brought Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to the list and at the same time Murray developed its own remarkable list of popular fiction authors, including P.C. Wren, one of the bestsellers of his day.
In the 1930s John Murray VI entered the firm and built a list of twentieth-century greats that included John Betjeman (whose Collected Poems has now sold close to two million copies), Osbert Lancaster, Iris Origo, Mary Renault, Philip Magnus, Freya Stark and two authors still publishing with the firm, Patrick Leigh Fermor and Dervla Murphy. Post-war highlights include Françoise Sagan’s astonishing debut, Bonjour Tristesse, and in the 1960s the first TV tie-in, Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation, as well as Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s Booker Prize-Winning Heat and Dust in 1975.
In 2002 John Murray was sold to Hodder Headline which has now in turn become part of Hachette UK, where the company continues with the innovative traditions of nearly a quarter of a millennium, pioneering new ideas, working closely and creatively with authors and publishing the very highest quality titles in all fields.