Establishment
In June 1889, as a sideline to teaching, Algernon Methuen began to publish and market his own textbooks under the label Methuen & Co.
The company’s first success at publishing came in 1892 with the publication of Rudyard Kipling's Barrack-Room Ballads. The firm soon experienced rapid growth by publishing works by Marie Corelli, Hilaire Belloc, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Oscar Wilde (De Profundis, 1905) as well as Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan of the Apes.
In 1910 the business was converted into a limited liability company with E. V. Lucas and G.E. Webster joining the founder on the board of directors.
The company published the 1920 English translation of Albert Einstein’s “Relativity, the Special and the General Theory: A Popular Exposition”.
Building on the knowledge he had gained with children’s literature at the publisher Grant Richards, E.V. Lucas ensured the company sustained its early success by developing its list of children’s books. Among the authors Lucas signed to the company were A. A. Milne, Kenneth Grahame, while he also supported illustrators W. Heath Robinson, H.M. Bateman and Ernest Shepard.
By the 1920s it had in addition to the previously mentioned authors a literary list that included Anthony Hope, G.K. Chesterton, Henry James, D. H. Lawrence, T. S. Eliot, Ruth Manning-Sanders and The Arden Shakespeare series.
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