Parent company Taylor & Francis Country of origin United Kingdom Headquarters location Abingdon, United Kingdom Founded 1836 Parent organization Taylor & Francis | Status Active Distribution World wide Founder George Routledge Fiction genre Non-fiction | |
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Key people Jeremy North (MD Books) Publication types Books and academic journals Profiles | ||
Routledge (/ˈraʊtlɛdʒ/) is a British multinational publisher. It was founded in 1836 by George Routledge, and specialises in providing academic books, journals, & online resources in the fields of humanities, behavioral science, education, law and social science. The company publishes approximately 1,800 journals & 5,000 new books each year and their backlist encompasses over 70,000 titles. Routledge is claimed to be the largest global academic publisher within humanities and social sciences.
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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. Following the merger of Informa and T&F in 2004, Routledge become a publishing unit and major imprint within the Informa 'academic publishing' division. Routledge is headquartered in the main T&F office in Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxfordshire and also operates from T&F offices globally including in New York City, Melbourne, New Delhi, Singapore and Beijing.
History
The firm originated in 1836, when Camden bookseller George Routledge published an unsuccessful guidebook, The Beauties of Gilsand 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".
The venture was a success which was mainly due to the mass hysteria in the 1840s due to Railway Mania and it eventually led to Routledge, along with W H Warne's Brother Frederick Warne, to found the company, George Routledge & Co. in 1851. The following year in 1852, the company gained lucrative business through selling pirated reprints of Uncle Tom's Cabin, which allowed for it to be able to pay author Edward Bulwer-Lytton £20,000 for a 10-year lease allowing sole rights to print all 35 of his works including 19 of his novels to be sold cheaply as part of their "Railway Library" series.
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). Gaining rights to some titles, he founded Frederick Warne & Co in 1865, which became known for its Beatrix Potter books. In July 1865, his son Edmund Routledge became a partner, and the firm became George Routledge & Sons.
By 1902 the company was running close to bankruptcy. Following a successful restructuring, 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 merged with Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co., the descendant of companies founded by Charles Kegan Paul, Alexander Chenevix Trench, Nicholas Trübner, and George Redway.
These early 20th-century acquisitions brought with them lists of notable scholarly titles, and from 1912 onward, under the new name Routledge & Kegan Paul, the company became increasingly concentrated in the academic and scholarly publishing business. It was soon particularly known for its titles in the social sciences.
In 1985, Routledge & Kegan Paul joined with Associated Book Publishers (ABP), 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 year 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.
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. Humanities and social sciences titles acquired by T&F from other publishers are rebranded under the Routledge imprint.
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.
Authors
Routledge has published many of the greatest thinkers and scholars of the last hundred years, including Adorno, Bohm, Butler, Derrida, Einstein, Foucault, Freud, Hayek, Jung, Levi-Strauss, McLuhan, Marcuse, Popper, Russell, Sartre and Wittgenstein. The republished works of these authors have appeared as part of the Routledge Classics and Routledge Great Minds series. Competitors to the series are Verso Books' Radical Thinkers, Penguin Classics and Oxford World's Classics.
Encyclopaedias & Reference Works
Taylor and Francis closed down the Routledge print encyclopaedia division in 2006. Some of its publications were:
Reference Works by Europa Publications, published by Routledge:
Many of Routledge's reference works are now published in print and electronic formats as Routledge Handbooks and have their own dedicated digital platform Routledge Handbooks Online. The company also publishes several online encyclopedias and collections of digital content such as Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism Routledge Performance Archive, and South Asia Archive.