British History
Thomas Nelson founded the company that bears his name in Edinburgh in 1798, originally as a second-hand religious bookshop but soon diversifying into publishing reprints of Puritan writers. The firm went on to become a publisher of new books, and as the nineteenth century progressed it produced an increasingly wide range of non-religious materials; by 1881 religion accounted for less than 6% of the firm's output.
Their Hope Park Works in Edinburgh burned down in 1878 and the city helped them greatly in the rebuilding project. They funded the stone pillars on the Meadows for the Edinburgh International Exhibition in 1886 in appreciation (designed by Sir James Gowans).
By the early twentieth century, Thomas Nelson had become a secular concern in the United Kingdom. Until 1968, according to the curators of a Senate House Library exhibition, it "specialised in producing popular literature, children's books, Bibles, religious works and educational texts." It was the first publisher for Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
Thomson owned the company from 1960 until 2000. That year it was acquired by Wolters Kluwer, who merged Nelson with its existing publishing arm, Stanley Thornes, to form Nelson Thornes.
Read more about this topic: Thomas Nelson (publisher)
Famous quotes containing the words british and/or history:
“It’s like the Beatles coming together again—let’s hope they don’t go on a world tour.”
—Matt Frei, British journalist. Quoted in Listener (London, June 21, 1990)
“When we of the so-called better classes are scared as men were never scared in history at material ugliness and hardship; when we put off marriage until our house can be artistic, and quake at the thought of having a child without a bank-account and doomed to manual labor, it is time for thinking men to protest against so unmanly and irreligious a state of opinion.”
—William James (1842–1910)