"We have commenced quite in a small way," said Daniel Macmillan when he and his brother Alexander began to publish books in 1843. "If the business should prosper. . . ." It did. And having become one of the world's greatest, richest publishing houses, Macmillan & Co. commissioned Macmillan Author Charles Morgan (The Fountain) to write a history of its first 100 years. Recently published in England (U.S. publication this spring), The House of Macmillan is an entertaining story of the book world's liveliest centenarian.
Caution and Carroll. The founder brothers, Daniel and Alexander, were born of poor farmers from the Scottish island of Arran.* Devout Protestants, fervent educators, they were also canny as brook trout. Their first books, cautiously selected for their long-term moral, educational and financial value, included such titles as Elements of the Gospel Harmony, A Guide to the Unprotected in Matters of Property and Income ("by a Banker's Daughter"), Differential Calculus, History of the Book of Common Prayer (of which a revised edition is still on Macmillan's list today).
Early in the game, the brothers' religious interest paid off in a big way. A clergyman friend, the Rev. Charles Kingsley, brought them a novel he had written called Westward Ho! "The right article and no mistake!" cried Alexander. He was dead right. Two years later the brothers hit the jackpot again with Thomas Hughes's Tom Brown's Schooldays. Soon they added Thomas Huxley and Matthew Arnold to their list, gained wide prestige with Palgrave's Golden Treasury of English Songs and Lyrics and The Cambridge Shakespeare.
Probably the most versatile, and certainly the most eccentric, of all Macmillan authors was mathematician, clergyman and humorist Charles Lutwidge Dodson, who wrote under the name of Lewis Carroll (Alice's Adventures in Wonderland; Lawn Tennis Tournaments: The True Method of Assigning Prizes, with a Proof of the Fallacy of the Present Method; An Elementary Treatise on Determinants and Their Application to Simultaneous Linear Equations and Algebraical Geometry, For the Use of Beginners).
Lewis Carroll drove Macmillan's crazy with suggestions. He urged them to use gold type. He sent them a huge diagram illustrating the "correct" way to wrap and tie parcels. He liked his books to appear in different formats—50 copies in a red binding, 20 in green, 20 in blue, two in vellum, one with primrose edges, one with a piece of mirror set in the cover. He also conducted some inside operations: "In thousands of copies of his books he had inserted . . . a 'Caution' in which he had disavowed authorship of a story . . . published in a magazine over his signature. He had not written it, the 'Caution' explained; he had done no more than forward it to the editor on behalf of a foreign lady, whose name he gave. Now, when it was too late, he found he had given the name of the wrong lady."