Longman

Description

The House of Longman is one of the longest-lived publishers in the UK. Its activities began in 1724, when Thomas Longman started selling books in London’s Paternoster Row, 39. The shop was that of a publishing house which bore the Sign of the Ship, and which, five years earlier, had published Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. Thanks to the sales of this novel, Thomas Longman was able to buy the adjacent shop as well, the Black Swan. From then on, the ship and the swan were used as the House’s emblems.
Thomas Longman died in 1755, the same year in which Longman became a co-publisher of Samuel Johnson’s The Dictionary of the English Language.
In 1861, the buildings of the House in Paternoster Row were destroyed in a fire, they were rebuilt, but they were destroyed forever in December 1940 during German air raids over London. The House was then moved to Wimbledon.
The House opened its first international branch in Toronto in 1922. This was followed by the branch in Kuala Lumpur in 1952 and in Hong Kong in 1958.
In 1947, the House of Longman became a public limited liability company, while in 1966 the Longman Group was created.
Two years later, the Group moved to Harlow, and it became part of the multi-product conglomerate S. Pearson & Son Ltd.
Longman still prospered between the 1970s and 1990s, a period characterised by the taking over of other firms such as the British Pitman (1985) and the American Addison-Wesley (1988).
Longman ceased to exist as an independent company in 1994, although the Longman imprint still appeared after that year.
As regards ELT publishing at Longman, the division gained increasing importance thanks to the role played by Ernest Walter Parker, C.S.S. Higham and Micheal West. In the 1930s, the success of the division depended on the popularity of books written by Charles Ewart Eckersley, such as England and the English (1932), A Concise English Grammar for Foreign Students (1935), Modern English Course (1933), Essential English (1938), and Brighter English (1937). These books sold thousands of copies around the world and demonstrate the importance of ELT publishing in the history of Longman before and after the Second World War, despite intense competition by publishers such as Macmillan and Oxford University Press.
Between the 1950s and the 1960s, Longman established close ties with the British Council, which featured Longman books in its international exhibitions and libraries.
In the 1960s, Longman also published titles in Linguistics and Applied Linguistics.
Between 1961 and 1971, the ELT division’s turnover rose from £750,000 to £3 million, thus amounting to 20.6% of the overall company’s sales.
The year 1978 was marked by the publication of the flagship Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English, edited in-house by Paul Protecter, who was a renowned lexicographer with considerable experience in the dictionary-making process. The Dictionary included 55,000 entries with 69,00 examples of word usage in sentences. The British Linguist Randolph Quirk had been responsible for finding new contemporary words to be included in the Dictionary, and for that task he had relied on the competence of distinguished experts from different fields.
ELT publishing was still very profitable in the 1980s: in 1988 world sales were £13.5 million, corresponding to 19.5% of the Group’s total sales. This was the year in which a new Longman English Grammar by Louis George Alexander was published, who thanks to the immense popularity of his textbooks became one of the best-selling authors of all times.