John Murray, founded in 1768 and the oldest independent publisher in the U.K., has been bought by Hodder Headline. Hodder Headline has been in business nine years and became part of the WH Smith retail and publishing group in 1999. The sale took the London publishing world by surprise and emphasizes the decline in independent publishing, coming only two months after the sale of the Harvill Press to Random House.
Currently run by the seventh generation of the family, John Murray was the most quintessentially British publishing house. Its backlist reads like a who's who of great British writers. Jane Austen entrusted Emma to John Murray in 1815, and Murray's first bestseller was Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, purchased from Lord Byron in 1811. Other world famous authors included Charles Darwin and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, but in recent years the firm's fortunes have foundered, as it was unable to compete, particularly in the fiction market, with the huge advances paid by publishing conglomerates.
In 2000 John Murray earned £367,000 on revenues of £8 million, with fewer than 100 new titles appearing on average each year. It had become increasingly difficult to get John Murray titles into the larger book chains in the U.K., as WH Smith and Waterstone's no longer regularly see publishers' representatives from small publishers. Murray's education list has remained a jewel in its crown, however, and WH Smith was keen to integrate this area of expertise into its own retail and publishing interests.
The high caliber of the John Murray list will add a gloss to Hodder Headline's commercial list. Tim Hely Hutchinson, chief executive of Hodder Headline, declared the deal "a perfect fit." Hodder Headline is now the fourth largest publisher in the U.K., with sales this year of £130 million.
John Murray VII and managing director Nicholas Perren will continue to run the business for a transitional period up until the end of June and will oversee the transfer of staff to Hodder Headline. Murray's general list will continue under its own name, and some paperbacks will become Hodder Sceptre titles.
