Routledge

Routledge (/ˈraʊtlɪdʒ/)[2] is a British multinational publisher. It was founded in 1836 by George Routledge, and specialises in providing academic books, journals and online resources in the fields of humanities, behavioural science, education, law, and social science. The company publishes approximately 1,800 journals and 5,000 new books each year and their backlist encompasses over 70,000 titles.[3] Routledge is claimed to be the largest global academic publisher within humanities and social sciences.[4][5]

Routledge

Parent company	Taylor & Francis
Status	Active
Founded	1851
Founder	George Routledge
Country of origin	United Kingdom
Headquarters location	Milton Park, Abingdon-on-Thames, Oxfordshire, England, UK
Distribution	World wide
Key people	Jeremy North (MD Books)[1]
Publication types	Books and academic journals
Nonfiction topics	Humanities, social science, behavioral science, education, law
Official website	routledge.com

In 1998, Routledge became a subdivision and imprint of its former rival, Taylor & Francis Group (T&F), as a result of a £90-million acquisition deal from Cinven, a venture capital group which had purchased it two years previously for £25 million.[6] Following the merger of Informa and T&F in 2004, Routledge become a publishing unit and major imprint within the Informa "academic publishing" division.[7] Routledge is headquartered in the main T&F office in Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxfordshire and also operates from T&F offices globally including in Philadelphia, Melbourne, New Delhi, Singapore, and Beijing.[8]

History

The firm originated in 1836, when the London bookseller George Routledge published an unsuccessful guidebook, The Beauties of Gilsland, with his brother-in-law W. H. (William Henry) Warne as assistant. In 1848, the pair entered the booming market for selling inexpensive imprints of works of fiction to rail travellers, in the style of the German Tauchnitz family, which became known as the "Railway Library".[9][10]

The venture was a success as railway usage grew, and it eventually led to Routledge, along with W H Warne's brother Frederick Warne, to found the company, George Routledge & Co. in 1851.[11] The following year in 1852, the company gained lucrative business through selling reprints of Uncle Tom's Cabin, (in the public domain in the UK) which in turn enabled it to pay author Edward Bulwer-Lytton £20,000 for a 10-year lease allowing sole rights to print all 35 of his works[9][12] including 19 of his novels to be sold cheaply as part of their "Railway Library" series.[13]

Routledge stand at Senate House History Day 2018

The company was restyled in 1858 as Routledge, Warne & Routledge when George Routledge's son, Robert Warne Routledge, entered the partnership. Frederick Warne eventually left the company after the death of his brother W. H. Warne in May 1859 (died aged 37).[14] Gaining rights to some titles, he founded Frederick Warne & Co. in 1865, which became known for its Beatrix Potter books.[15] In July 1865, George Routledge's son Edmund Routledge became a partner, and the firm became George Routledge & Sons.[16]

By 1899, the company was running close to bankruptcy. Following a successful restructuring in 1902 by scientist Sir William Crookes, banker Arthur Ellis Franklin, William Swan Sonnenschein as managing director, and others, however, it was able to recover and began to acquire and merge with other publishing companies including J. C. Nimmo Ltd. in 1903. In 1912, the company took over the management of Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co., the descendant of companies founded by Charles Kegan Paul, Alexander Chenevix Trench, Nicholas Trübner, and George Redway.[17]

These early 20th-century acquisitions brought with them lists of notable scholarly titles, and from 1912 onward, the company became increasingly concentrated in the academic and scholarly publishing business under the imprint "Kegan Paul Trench Trubner", as well as reference, fiction and mysticism. In 1947, George Routledge and Sons finally merged with Kegan Paul Trench Trubner (the umlaut had been quietly dropped in the First World War) under the name of Routledge & Kegan Paul.[18] Using C. K. Ogden and later Karl Mannheim as advisers the company was soon particularly known for its titles in philosophy, psychology and the social sciences.

In 1985, Routledge & Kegan Paul joined with Associated Book Publishers (ABP),[19] which was later acquired by International Thomson in 1987. Under Thomson's ownership, Routledge's name and operations were retained, and, in 1996, a management buyout financed by the European private equity firm Cinven saw Routledge operating as an independent company once again. Just two years later, Cinven and Routledge's directors accepted a deal for Routledge's acquisition by Taylor & Francis Group (T&F), with the Routledge name being retained as an imprint and subdivision.[20]

In 2004, T&F became a division within Informa plc after a merger. Routledge continues as a primary publishing unit and imprint within Informa's 'academic publishing' division, publishing academic humanities and social science books, journals, reference works and digital products. Routledge has grown considerably as a result of organic growth and acquisitions of other publishing companies and other publishers' titles by its parent company.[21][22][23] Humanities and social sciences titles acquired by T&F from other publishers are rebranded under the Routledge imprint.[22]

People

The famous English publisher Fredric Warburg was a commissioning editor at Routledge during the early 20th century. Novelist Nina Stibbe, author of Love, Nina, worked at the company as a commissioning editor in the 1990s.[24]

Authors

Routledge has published many of the greatest thinkers and scholars of the last hundred years, including Adorno, Bohm, Butler, Derrida, Felix Dodds, Einstein, Foucault, Freud, Al Gore, Hayek, Jung, Levi-Strauss, McLuhan, Marcuse, Popper, Johan Rockström, Russell, Sartre, and Wittgenstein. The republished works of some of these authors have appeared as part of the Routledge Classics[25] and Routledge Great Minds series. Competitors to the series are Verso Books' Radical Thinkers, Penguin Classics, and Oxford World's Classics.

Publications

Routledge has been criticised for a pricing structure which "will limit readership to the privileged few", as opposed to options for "open access without tears" offered by DOAJ, Unpaywall, and DOAB.[26]

Reference works

Taylor and Francis closed down the Routledge print encyclopaedia division in 2006. Some of its publications were:

• Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, by Edward Craig (1998), in 10 volumes, but now online.[27]
• Encyclopedia of Ethics, by Lawrence C. Becker and Charlotte B. Becker (2002), in three volumes.

Reference works by Europa Publications, published by Routledge:

• Europa World Year Book[28]
• International Who's Who[29]
• Europa World of Learning[30]

Many of Routledge's reference works are published in print and electronic formats as Routledge Handbooks and have their own dedicated website: Routledge Handbooks Online.[31] The company also publishes several online encyclopedias and collections of digital content such as Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy,[27] Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism,[32] Routledge Performance Archive,[33] and South Asia Archive.[34]

Book series

• The Broadway Travellers (1926–37)[35]
• Colloquial Series of Multimedia Language Courses[36]
• Morley's Universal Library (also known as: Routledge's Universal Library) (1883–88)[37]
• The Muses' Library (1904–1940; 1950–1980)

  established in 1891 by Lawrence & Bullen as a series of fine editions of poetry until L&B folded in 1900, Routledge revived the series in 1904 with reprints and new titles. Over the years parallel editions were published in the US by Charles Scribner’s Sons, E.P. Dutton and Harvard University Press[38]

• The Republic of Letters[39]
• Routledge's Railway Library (1848–99)

  were sold through W. H. Smith's bookstalls on railway platforms; in 50 years 1,277 books were published, most as pictorial hardbacks, with some bestsellers re-released as cheaper paperbacks. Authors included Edward Bulwer Lytton, James Fenimore Cooper, Jane Austen, Benjamin Disraeli, Henry Fielding, Frances Trollope, William Harrison Ainsworth, Alexandre Dumas, and Victor Hugo[10]

References

Citations

1. "Managing Director, Humanities & Social Science Books, Taylor & Francis Group". Informa.
2. Upton, Clive; Kretzschmar, William A., Jr. (2017). The Routledge Dictionary of Pronunciation for Current English (2nd ed.). Routledge. p. 1164. ISBN 978-1-138-12566-7.
3. "About Us – Routledge". Retrieved 14 February 2015.
4. "Publishing With Us – Routledge". Taylor & Francis Group. 2016.
5. "Outsell HSS Market Size Share Forecast" (PDF).
6. "Books merger yields windfall of £6m". The Independent. Retrieved 14 February 2015.
7. "Academic Publishing".
8. "T&F Group Global Offices".
9. "Yellowbacks: III – Routledge's Railway Library". Retrieved 15 February 2015.
10. Wagner, David Paul. "Routledge's Railway Library (George Routledge)". Book Series List. Publishing History. Retrieved 10 August 2019.
11. "UCL Library Services: Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd Archives – 1850–1984". Retrieved 15 February 2015.
12. Sutherland (2009:527,553).
13. Barnes, James J.; Barnes, Patience P. (2004). "Routledge, George". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online ed.). Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/24184. (Subscription or UK public library membership required.)
14. "Geni – William Henry Warne (1822–1859) – Genealogy". Retrieved 16 February 2015.
15. "ketupa.net – Taylor and Francis Informa". Retrieved 16 February 2015.
16. "Routledge, George (DNB00)". DNB. Retrieved 10 November 2015.
17. "The Lucile Project,"PUBLISHER: Kegan Paul, Trench & Company; Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Company, London"". University of Iowa. Retrieved 12 December 2016.
18. Franklin (1987),
19. Whipp (1992:47)
20. Clark & Phillips (2008:xvi); Cope (1998)
21. Academic Publishing Industry: A Story of Merger and Acquisition Archived 18 June 2012 at the Wayback Machine - Taylor & Francis.
22. Taylor & Francis
23. "Results for 12 months to 31st December 2015" (PDF).
24. "About Nina Stibbe".
25. "Routledge Classics and Routledge Great Minds".
26. Barbara Fister. "The Writing on the Unpaywall". Inside Higher Ed. Retrieved 25 April 2020.
27. "Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy".
28. "Europa World Online".
29. "World Who's Who".
30. "The Europa World of Learning".
31. "Routledge Handbooks Online".
32. "Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism".
33. "Routledge Performance Archive".
34. "South Asia Archive".
35. Stone, Thomas E. "Collecting The Broadway Travellers Series". The Books In My Life blog. Retrieved 10 August 2019.
36. Colloquial Series, routledge.com. Retrieved 14 January 2018.
37. Morley's Universal Library (George Routledge) - Book Series List, publishinghistory.com. Retrieved 24 June 2018.
38. Krygier, John. "Muses' Library". A Series of Series. Ohio Wesleyan University. Retrieved 10 August 2019 – via WordPress.
39. Krygier, John. "Republic of Letters". A Series of Series. Ohio Wesleyan University. Retrieved 10 August 2019.

Sources

• Boynton, Robert (March–April 1995). "The Routledge Revolution: Has Academic Publishing Gone Tabloid?" (online reproduction, by author [n.pag.]). Lingua Franca: the review of academic life. Vol. 5 no. 3. Mamaroneck, NY: Lingua Franca, Inc. pp. 24–32. OCLC 61311445. Retrieved 21 August 2009.
• Clark, Giles N.; Angus Phillips (2008). Inside Book Publishing. Taylor & Francise-Library collection (4th ed.). Abingdon, England; New York, NY: Routledge. ISBN 978-0-203-34154-4. OCLC 182573667.
• Cope, Nigel (5 November 1998). "Books merger yields windfall of £6m" (online edition). The Independent. London: Independent News & Media. Retrieved 21 August 2009.
• Franklin, Norman (1986). Routledge & Kegan Paul: 150 years of Great Publishing. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
• Sutherland, John (2009). The Longman Companion to Victorian Fiction (2nd ed.). Abingdon, England; New York, NY: Routledge. ISBN 978-1408203903.
• Warburg, Fredric (1960). An Occupation for Gentlemen (1st American ed.). Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin. OCLC 1201220.
• Whipp, Richard (1992). "Human Resource Management, Competition and Strategy: Some Productive Tensions". In Paul Blyton; Peter Turnbull (eds.). Reassessing Human Resource Management. London: SAGE Publications. pp. 33–55. ISBN 0-8039-8697-1. OCLC 28325927.

External links

• Official website
• Routledge Revivals: Reprints from humanities and social sciences publications, from the backlists of Routledge imprints
• Routledge & Kegan Paul Archives: Ledgers, authors' agreements, printed catalogues and other papers 1853-1973, University College London Library.
• Records of Routledge & Kegan Paul – Correspondence files covering the period 1935 to 1990, as well as review files 1950s-1990s, Special Collections, University of Reading Library.
• Archives of George Routledge & Company 1853-1902, Chadwyck-Healey Ltd, 1973. 6 reels of microfilm and printed index. (Available from ProQuest)
• Archives of Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner and Henry S. King 1858-1912, Chadwyck-Healey Ltd,1973. 27 reels of microfilm with index on microfiche. (Available from Proquest)