 | |
| Industry | Retail |
|---|---|
| Founded | 1761 |
| Founder | Henry Sotheran |
| Headquarters | , UK |
| Website | Official website |
Henry Sotheran Ltd is a bookshop in London, England, claiming to be the oldest continuously operating bookshop in the United Kingdom and the oldest antiquarian bookshop in the world. It is located at 18 Upper Brook Street in the Mayfair area of London.
Founded in 1761 in York by Henry Sotheran, Sotheran's established a presence in London in 1815. In 1901, it was granted the Royal warrant of appointment as booksellers and bookbinders to King Edward VII, renewed by George V in 1910. [1]
In 1892, Sotheran's managed to secure Althorp’s complete library, including its very rare collection of Caxtons, for £210,000 (equivalent to almost £33.5 million in 2024); the collection was sold to Enriqueta Augustina Rylands, who erected in Manchester a permanent memorial of her husband in the John Rylands Library. [2] In 1896, Sotheran's sold to J. P. Morgan a Gutenberg Bible on vellum, for £2,750, and an even more expensive collection of Byron manuscripts; the following year, it secured the Warwick Castle Shakespeare Library for Henry Clay Folger. [1] [3] [4]
From 1936 to 2024, the shop was located at 2-5 Sackville Street, London.
English bookseller and Charles Dickens scholar John Harrison Stonehouse joined the firm as an apprentice in 1884. He ultimately became the managing director through his skills of literacy, invention, and marketing. [5] [6] Under his direction, Sotheran's ordered several significant bindings and fore-edge paintings from renowned binders, including finely painted 'Cosway' bindings. [7] In 1909, Stonehouse commissioned the bookbinders Sangorski & Sutcliffe to produce the famous jewelled copy of Edward FitzGerald's The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam , lost with the Titanic in 1912. [8] [9]
Sir Frederic Madden KH was an English palaeographer.
Bernard Alexander Christian Quaritch was a German-born British bookseller and collector.
The John Rylands Research Institute and Library is a late-Victorian neo-Gothic building on Deansgate in Manchester, England. It is part of the University of Manchester. The library, which opened to the public in 1900, was founded by Enriqueta Augustina Rylands in memory of her husband, John Rylands. It became part of the university in 1972, and now houses the majority of the Special Collections of The University of Manchester Library, the third largest academic library in the United Kingdom.
John Rylands was an English entrepreneur and philanthropist. He was the owner of the largest textile manufacturing concern in the United Kingdom, and Manchester's first multi-millionaire.
Hatchards is an English bookshop claiming to be the oldest in the United Kingdom, founded on Piccadilly in 1797 by John Hatchard. After one move, it has been at the same location on Piccadilly next to Fortnum & Mason since 1801, and the two stores are also neighbours in St. Pancras railway station as of 2014. It has a reputation for attracting high-profile authors and holds three royal warrants granted by King Charles III, Queen Elizabeth II, and Prince Philip respectively.
A fore-edge painting is a scene painted on the edges of book pages. There are two basic forms, including paintings on fanned edges and closed edges. For the first type, the book's leaves must be fanned, exposing the pages' edges for the picture to become visible. For the second, closed type, the image is visible only while the book is closed.
Enriqueta Augustina Rylands was a British philanthropist who founded the John Rylands Library in Manchester.
Bookselling is the commercial trading of books which is the retail and distribution end of the publishing process.
John Cassidy was an Irish sculptor and painter who worked in Manchester, England, and created many public sculptures.
David Lindsay, 1st Lord Lindsay of Balcarres was a Scottish nobleman.
George Ayres Leavitt was the son of a Massachusetts bookbinder who founded several of New York's earliest publishing firms. George Leavitt subsequently founded his own publishing company, Leavitt & Allen, but it failed during a financial panic that swept the nation during the American Civil War. Leavitt later tried to reestablish himself as both publisher and fine arts auctioneers, founding one of the first upscale auction houses, and eventually retiring from the book industry entirely.
Maggs Bros. Ltd. is one of the longest-established antiquarian booksellers in the world, established in 1853 by Uriah Maggs, born c. 1828 in Midsomer Norton, Somerset. All four of Uriah's sons eventually joined the business, taking over on his retirement in 1894.
Edward Gordon Duff, known as Gordon Duff, was a British bibliographer and librarian known for his works on early English printing.
Gabriel Wells was a noted bookseller, historian and author. He was one of the most important antiquarian booksellers in America and Britain in the first half of the twentieth century. He was president of the Antiquarian Booksellers' Association in 1930.
James Robert Tyrrell was an Australian bookseller, art dealer, publisher and author. He enjoyed a career of seven decades in the booktrade and was esteemed in his era as the "doyen of Sydney booksellers". He wrote a standard history of early bookselling in Australia entitled Old Books, Old Friends, Old Sydney.
Albert Henry Spencer, often referred to as A. H. Spencer, was an Australian bookseller. He was a specialist in antiquarian bookselling and Australiana and established the Hill of Content bookshop in Melbourne, one of that city's "finest bookshops". He has been called "one of the last links with an heroic age of Australian bookselling and collecting".
Bernard Hartmut Breslauer was a German antiquarian book dealer and collector, who lived in turn in Germany, England and the United States.
The selling of books dates back to ancient times. The founding of libraries in c.300 BC stimulated the energies of the Athenian booksellers. In Rome, toward the end of the republic, it became the fashion to have a library, and Roman booksellers carried on a flourishing trade.
Deighton, Bell, & Company was a British firm of booksellers and publishers located in Cambridge, England. It enjoyed a long and close association with the University of Cambridge. In 1978 it celebrated two centuries in the book business and, along with two other booksellers Heffers and Bowes & Bowes, the firm contributed to "making Cambridge a prestigious centre of bookselling".
John Harrison Stonehouse was an English bookseller and Charles Dickens scholar at long-established London booksellers Sotheran's where he rose from apprentice to managing director through hard work and a strong entrepreneurial instinct. He introduced and popularised the "Cosway" binding and commissioned the opulent edition of Edward FitzGerald's The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam that was lost when RMS Titanic sank in 1912. He published a book on the subject in 1933.
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