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Parent company | David & Charles Ltd (since 2000) |
---|---|
Status | Active |
Founded | 1 April 1960 |
Founder | David St John Thomas Charles Hadfield |
Headquarters location | Exeter, England |
Distribution | GMC Distribution, Grantham Book Service (UK) [1] [2] |
Publication types | Book, E-book, E-learning |
Imprints | David & Charles |
Revenue | £5 million (2021) [3] |
Official website | www |
David & Charles Ltd is an English publishing company. It is the owner of the David & Charles imprint, which specialises in craft and lifestyle publishing. David and Charles Ltd acts as distributor for all David and Charles Ltd books and content outside North America, and also distributes Interweave Press publications in the UK and worldwide excluding North America, and as foreign language editions. [4] The company distributes Dover Publications and Reader's Digest books into the UK Trade [5] and is also a UK and Europe distribution platform for the overseas acquired companies Krause Publications and Adams Media.
The current company was founded in 2019, taking the original founding name of the business that was first established in 1960. The company is the UK distributor for Dover Publications.
David and Charles was first founded in Newton Abbot, England, on 1 April 1960 by David St John Thomas and Charles Hadfield. It made its name publishing titles on Britain's canals and railways. The company's first employees worked from a hut in David St John Thomas' garden. As the business expanded the company relocated to the Newton Abbot railway station building, eventually taking over the locomotive shed for use as a warehouse. [6]
From 1965 to 1970 David & Charles had an extensive list of books published with the American imprint Augustus M. Kelley. These books were usually almost identical to the United Kingdom product but with changed dust jacket and publisher's information.
In 1971, the company bought Readers' Union, a group of book clubs catering to enthusiasts of needlecraft, handicrafts, gardening, equestrian pursuits and photography. The company's publishing programme began to reflect these subject areas, moving away from the traditional transport titles for which it had become known. Membership of the Readers' Union book clubs peaked at 268,000 members in 1992, making it "the largest privately-owned book club operation in the English-speaking world". [7]
The company was sold to Reader's Digest in 1990 before a subsequent management buy-out in 1997. In 2000, the company was bought by American company F+W Publications, which later became F+W Media. The growth of internet retailing led to the closure of the Readers' Union book clubs in 2008, which were replaced with the ecommerce business RUCraft. RUCraft rebranded to become Stitch Craft Create in January 2013.
The company was rebranded to become F&W Media International in 2010. It continued to publish new books under the David and Charles imprint, focusing entirely on craft and lifestyle categories. In October 2013, the company launched a UK ecommerce site in partnership with Burda Style. In November 2015, the company moved from Newton Abbot to Pynes Hill in Exeter and completed the acquisition of the online ecommerce business SewandSo.co.uk.
In March 2019, F+W Media announced entered Chapter 11 Bankruptcy proceedings. The book publishing assets of F&W Media International were acquired in a Management Buy-Out led by managing director, James Woollam. A new company was formed in July 2019 to complete the buy-out and was able to return to the David and Charles name.
Among the early titles were The Canals of the British Isles series, edited and often written by Hadfield – he wrote in full or part, at least five of the volumes. Another series was the A Regional History of the Railways of Great Britain (15 volumes); with the first volume written by St John Thomas and which led to the publishing of two companion series: Forgotten Railways and Railway History in Pictures. The Scottish writer John Thomas wrote a series of books on Scotland railway lines and railway companies, first published in the 1960s and 1970s by the company. John Marshall was another railway historian published by the company. The company also published travel and topographical works from the 1960s through to the 1990s of which The Islands Series and the Light and the Land books by Colin Baxter were the most prominent examples. One of their 1968 titles was a new edition of E. Temple Thurston's The Flower of Gloster which had been out of print since 1918. The book is today regarded as both a seminal work in canal literature and a classic example of Edwardian romanticism. The company also specialised in reprints of early technical and travel works and republished several issues of Baedeker's early-20th-century country guides as well some of the Edwardian works by Fred T Jane.
David and Charles creates and distributes online course materials in partnership with the Royal School of Needlework and Kew Gardens. In 2021, they published their first multi-platform journal, The Anti-Burnout Journal written by Bex Spiller, combining traditional pen and paper journaling with an online course.
The Thames and Medway Canal is a disused canal in Kent, south east England, also known as the Gravesend and Rochester Canal. It was originally some 11 km (6.8 mi) long and cut across the neck of the Hoo peninsula, linking the River Thames at Gravesend with the River Medway at Strood. The canal was first mooted in 1778 as a shortcut for military craft from Deptford and Woolwich Dockyards on the Thames to Chatham Dockyard on the Medway, avoiding the 74 km (46 mi) journey round the peninsula and through the Thames estuary. The canal was also intended to take commercial traffic between the two rivers.
The Midland Railway (MR) was a railway company in the United Kingdom from 1844. The Midland was one of the largest railway companies in Britain in the early 20th century, and the largest employer in Derby, where it had its headquarters. It amalgamated with several other railways to create the London, Midland and Scottish Railway at grouping in 1923.
The canal network of the United Kingdom played a vital role in the Industrial Revolution. The UK was the first country to develop a nationwide canal network which, at its peak, expanded to nearly 4,000 miles in length. The canals allowed raw materials to be transported to a place of manufacture, and finished goods to be transported to consumers, more quickly and cheaply than by a land based route. The canal network was extensive and included feats of civil engineering such as the Anderton Boat Lift, the Manchester Ship Canal, the Worsley Navigable Levels and the Pontcysyllte Aqueduct.
Newton Abbot is a market town and civil parish on the River Teign in the Teignbridge District of Devon, England. Its population was 24,029 in 2011, and was estimated at 26,655 in 2019. It grew rapidly in the Victorian era as the home of the South Devon Railway locomotive works. This later became a major steam engine shed, retained to service British Railways diesel locomotives until 1981. It now houses the Brunel industrial estate. The town has a race course nearby, the most westerly in England, and a country park, Decoy. It is twinned with Besigheim in Germany and Ay in France.
Farrar, Straus and Giroux (FSG) is an American book publishing company, founded in 1946 by Roger Williams Straus Jr. and John C. Farrar. FSG is known for publishing literary books, and its authors have won numerous awards, including Pulitzer Prizes, National Book Awards, and Nobel Prizes. As of 2016 the publisher is a division of Macmillan, whose parent company is the German publishing conglomerate Holtzbrinck Publishing Group.
Routledge is a British multinational publisher. It was founded in 1836 by George Routledge, and specialises in providing academic books, journals and online resources in the fields of the humanities, behavioural science, education, law, and social science. The company publishes approximately 1,800 journals and 5,000 new books each year and their backlist encompasses over 140,000 titles. Routledge is claimed to be the largest global academic publisher within humanities and social sciences.
Harvard University Press (HUP) is an academic publishing house established on January 13, 1913, as a division of Harvard University. It is a member of the Association of University Presses. Its director since 2017 is George Andreou.
Bovey Tracey is a town and civil parish in Devon, England. It is located on the edge of Dartmoor, which gives rise to the slogan used on the town's boundary signs: The Gateway to the Moor. It is often known locally as Bovey. About 10 miles (16 km) south-west of Exeter, it lies on the A382 road, about halfway between Newton Abbot and Moretonhampstead. The village is at the centre of the electoral ward of Bovey. At the 2011 census, the population of the ward was 7,721.
Hodder & Stoughton is a British publishing house, now an imprint of Hachette.
F+W was a media and e-commerce company headquartered in New York City. Founded in 1913 in Cincinnati, F+W published magazines, books, digital products, produced online video, offered online education, and owned and operated e-stores, as well as consumer and trade shows.
Little, Brown and Company is an American publishing company founded in 1837 by Charles Coffin Little and James Brown in Boston. For close to two centuries, it has published fiction and nonfiction by American authors. Early lists featured Emily Dickinson's poetry and Bartlett's Familiar Quotations. Since 2006, Little, Brown and Company is a division of the Hachette Book Group.
Ellis Charles Raymond Hadfield was a canal historian and the author of many classic works on the British canal system, mostly published by the firm he co-founded, David & Charles.
David St John Thomas was an English publisher and writer who founded David & Charles.
The Hackney Canal was a short canal in Devon, England, that linked the Hackney Clay Cellars to the River Teign. It was privately built by Lord Clifford in 1843, and throughout its life carried ball clay for use in the production of pottery. It closed in 1928, when its function was replaced by road vehicles.
Annery kiln is a former limekiln of the estate of Annery, in the parish of Monkleigh, North Devon. It is situated on the left bank of the River Torridge near Half-Penny Bridge, built in 1835, which connects the parishes of Monkleigh and Weare Giffard. Running by it today is A386 road from Bideford to Great Torrington. Weare Giffard is the start of the tidal section of the River Torridge, and thus the kiln was sited here to import by river raw materials for the kiln, the product of which was lime fertiliser for use on inland agricultural fields. The old lime kiln is thus situated between the River Torridge and the now filled-in Rolle Canal built circa 1827 and railway that ran formerly from Bideford to Torrington, opened in 1872 and closed in 1966. The old trackbed now forms a stretch of the Tarka Trail.
Abrams, formerly Harry N. Abrams, Inc. (HNA), is an American publisher of art and illustrated books, children's books, and stationery.
John Marshall was an English railway historian. He is best known for his three-volume history of the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway 'which he greatly disliked being described as "definitive"' and for compiling The Guinness Railway Book 'which, in its six editions, is arguably the best selling railway book of all time.'
Alice Mary Hadfield, born Alice Mary Smyth, was a British book editor and writer, the co-ordinating editor of the first edition of The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations (1941), and the librarian at Oxford University Press's Amen House. She was also the founder, with her husband Charles Hadfield, of the South Cerney Trust in 1963.