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Grant Richards

Partick, Scotland, 1872 - 1948, Monte Carlo

Biographyhttp://id.loc.gov/authorities/names/n88156404
found: NUCMC data from Univ. of Virginia Lib. for White, W. Papers, 1910-1988 (Richards, Grant, 1872-1948; English publisher and writer on A.E. Housman)
found: LC data base, 8-11-89 (hdg.: Richards, Grant, 1872-1948
http://www.doaks.org/resources/bliss-tyler-correspondence/annotations/grant-richards
Oxford National Biography, http://proxy.bostonathenaeum.org:2055/view/article/47450 accessed 8/29/2017
Richards, (Franklin Thomas) Grant (1872–1948), publisher and writer, was born on 21 October 1872 at University Hall, Hillhead, Partick, Lanarkshire, the first of two children of Franklin Thomas Richards (d. 1905), at the time assistant to the chairman of Latin at the University of Glasgow, and his wife, Emily, née Jerrard. He spent his early years in Oxford, where his father by 1894 had assumed the post of fellow and tutor in Latin at Trinity College. He attended school at Langdale House, Oxford, from 1880, and later the City of London School. Known from his early years as Grant, as a child he remained emotionally distant from his family but was influenced strongly by an uncle, (Charles) Grant Blairfindie Allen (1848–1899), a prolific author of works of fiction and natural science. Grant Allen recognized Richards's interest in publishing and in 1888 arranged a job for him as junior clerk with the wholesale booksellers Hamilton, Adams & Co., and in 1890 obtained him a position with W. T. Stead on the Review of Reviews, where for the next six years he was involved with editorial work and reviewing.

With financial backing from Allen, another uncle, and his father, Richards opened his own publishing house in January 1897 at 9 Henrietta Street, Covent Garden, London. Under the imprint of Grant Richards, his substantial list that year included the first volumes in Grant Allen's Historical Guides series, Paris and Florence, Allen's The Evolution of the Idea of God, E. V. Lucas's A Book of Verse for Children, and Stead's Real Ghost Stories. In 1898 Richards published works by two of the major authors on which his reputation rests: G. B. Shaw's Plays Pleasant and Unpleasant, and A. E. Housman's A Shropshire Lad. He was also married in 1898; he and his first wife, Elisina Richards, had three sons, Gerard, Geoffrey, and Charles, and a daughter, Gioia. Richards remained Housman's publisher throughout the rest of his career, but more commonly authors published a few books with his firm and then moved on to more prominent houses; G. B. Shaw, G. K. Chesterton, Alfred Noyes, John Masefield, Hector H. Munro (Saki), Arnold Bennett, and Maurice Baring were of this number. Nevertheless, Richards's inspiration, energy, and taste served in identifying rising or under-appreciated writers of fiction and poetry (such as Samuel Butler, whose The Way of All Flesh he published in 1903), in producing expensive multi-volume collected works of Shakespeare and Jane Austen, and in initiating series including the World's Classics and the Dumpy Books for Children (which included Helen Bannerman's now infamous Story of Little Black Sambo in 1899). He was particularly attentive to the design of his books, many of which featured a distinctive fleuron on the title-page.

Richards's move in 1902 into larger London offices at 48 Leicester Square was a sign of his financial overreach, which led, in April 1905, to bankruptcy. Undaunted, he reorganized the firm, adding to his imprint the initial of his wife's name (trading as E. Grant Richards), and moving later that year to smaller offices at 7 Carlton Street. In 1908 the firm reverted to Richards's name and moved to 8 St Martin's Street. In the ensuing two decades Richards honed his already sharp eye for authors. In 1914, after nine years of sporadic negotiation with James Joyce over the blunt language of some of his short stories, Richards published Dubliners, and while declining Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, followed it with Joyce's play Exiles in 1918. A critical and financial success despite similarly risqué allusions was Thomas Burke's collection of stories about London's Chinatown, Limehouse Nights (1916). Alec Waugh's revelatory novel of public-school life, The Loom of Youth (1917), was a further success which led to his publication of six further books with Richards. Other authors of critical note that Richards published during these years included Osbert and Sacheverell Sitwell, Eden Phillpotts, and T. Sturge Moore. He published his own novel Caviare in 1912, following it with seven other novels. In 1917 he began a series of distinctive advertisements in the form of chatty columns in the Times Literary Supplement.
http://www.modernistarchives.com/business/grant-richards accessed 8/29/2017
by Lise Jaillant, Loughborough University
Grant Richards was only twenty-four years old when he created his first publishing house in 1897 at 9 Henrietta Street in Covent Garden. Born on 21 October 1872, he was the son of Franklin Thomas Richards, a Fellow and Tutor of Trinity College, Oxford. Growing up, Richards was close to his uncle Grant Allen, a prolific author most remembered for his bestselling novel The Woman Who Did (1895). It was thanks to Allen that the young man met his first employer, Arthur E. Miles of the wholesale booksellers Hamilton, Adams and Company. Richards then worked for W. T. Stead, publisher of the Review of Reviews.

When he founded his own firm, Richards had nearly a decade of experience working in clerical and editorial positions. A gregarious individual, he also had an extensive network of contacts in London’s literary world. Early on, he published several of Grant Allen’s texts and he showed determination and persistence to extend his list. In 1898, he brought out George Bernard Shaw’s Plays: Pleasant and Unpleasant and a new edition of A. E. Housman’s collection of poems A Shropshire Lad. Samuel Butler also became an important name on Richards’s list, with Erewhon Revisited (1901) and The Way of All Flesh (1903).

Richards launched the World’s Classics, a cheap series of reprints, in 1901. “When I started the series,” he later said, “the trade generally prophesied failure for it. Success, however, was immediate, increasing and continued, and the series might almost be said to be running its rivals off the field” (Richards to Turner & Co, 2 Jan. 1904). Since Richards mainly selected popular non-copyright books, he could not count on the uniqueness of his list. Jane Eyre, the first book included in the World’s Classics, had already appeared in other series. However, as Richard Altick has shown, many cheap series were poorly produced (15). To distinguish the World’s Classics from its competitors, Richards paid particular attention to the material aspect of the books while keeping prices low: “Size five x three-and-a-half inches, their standard bulk-one-and-a-half inches, stamped with a gilt spine decoration by Laurence Housman, they sold at no more than 1s cloth and 2s skiver leather” (Horder 42).

As a small, undercapitalized publisher, Richards was ill equipped to respond to the enormous and unexpected demand for his inexpensive reprints. To sustain the rapid expansion of the series, he went heavily into debt. In 1905, his firm went into bankruptcy. The main part of the Richards estate was acquired by Alexander Moring, who then negotiated with Henry Frowde of Oxford University Press for the sale of the World’s Classics.

Richards then started a new publishing house under the name of his wife, Elisina. By 1908, he was again publishing under his own name. Like John Lane and other enterprising small presses, Richards did not shy away from controversial literature. He offered to take on James Joyce’s Dubliners in 1906, but backed out when the printer objected to certain passages. As Robert Scholes notes, “much of his caution in dealing with Dubliners, as a matter of fact, stemmed from his precarious financial situation at the time” (140). He also took on Robert Tressell's The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists (1914). In his memoir, Author Hunting by an Old Literary Sportsman (1934), Richards recalls the forbidding sight of Tressell's half a million words of hand-written manuscript. Finding the writing both 'damnably subversive' and 'extraordinarily real', Richards agreed to publish the book if Jessie Pope, who had been given the manuscript by Tressell's surviving daughter, could cut it down to 100,000 words. It became a bestseller after the war when Richards brought out a shorter, one shilling edition.

After the First World War, Richards continued to discover young writers, including Alec Waugh and Thomas Burke. He also wrote about food and wine, and the pleasures of the Riviera.

Richards often complained of having little capital and went bankrupt again in 1926. When he died in 1948, the Times described him as “an adventurous publisher” with a “very real instinct for friendship,” “unruffled amiability,” and “handsome attire.” These personal qualities helped him make a significant impact on the publishing business of the early twentieth century.

Bibliography and Selected Further Reading
Altick, Richard. “From Aldine to Everyman: Cheap Reprint Series of the English Classics 1830-1906.” Studies in Bibliography 11 (1958): 3–24. Print.
Brockman, William S. “Grant Richards.” British Literary Publishing Houses, 1881-1965. Ed. Jonathan Rose and Patricia Anderson. Dictionary of Literary Biography. Vol. 112. Detroit: Gale Research, 1991. LiteratureResource Center.Web. 30 Dec. 2015.
Harker, Dave. The Real Story of The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists. London: Zed, 2003.
Horder, Mervyn. “Grant Richards: Portent & Legend.” London Magazine April/May 1991: 36–46. Print.
Jaillant, Lise. “‘Introductions by Eminent Writers’: T. S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf in the Oxford World’s Classics Series.” The Book World: Selling and Distributing Literature, 1900-1940. Ed. Nicola Wilson. Leiden: Brill, forthcoming. Print.
“Mr. Grant Richards: An Adventurous Publisher [obituary].” Times 25 Feb. 1948: 7. Print.
“Mr. Grant Richards’s Affairs.” Publishers’ Circular 22 Apr. 1905: 434. Print.
Richards, Grant. Author Hunting, by an Old Literary Sportsman; Memories of Years Spent Mainly in Publishing, 1897-1925. London: H. Hamilton, 1934. Print.
---. Letter to Herbert B. Turner & Co, 2 January 1904. Archives of Grant Richards, 1897-1948. Cambridge: Chadwyck-Healey, 1979. Microform, Letter book Vol. 4 (1903-1904).
---. Memories of a Misspent Youth, 1872-1896. London: Heinemann, 1932. Print.
Scholes, Robert. “Grant Richards to James Joyce.” Studies in Bibliography 16 (1963): 139–160. Print.
Sims, George. “Grant Richards: Publisher.” Antiquarian Book Monthly Review Jan. 1989: 14–27. Print.

Archives and Papers
Grant Richards Papers, 1897-1930s, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
http://www.library.illinois.edu/rbx/archon/?p=collections/controlcard&id=400

[ALSO AVAILABLE IN MICROFORM: Archives of Grant Richards, 1897-1948. Cambridge: Chadwyck-Healey, 1979]

Grant Richards, 1872-1948 Literary File, Photography Collection at Harry Ransom Research Center, The University of Texas at Austin
http://norman.hrc.utexas.edu/fasearch/html/lfrichards.html

Library of Congress, Grant Richards collection of A. E. Housmann material, 1898-1947
http://findingaids.loc.gov/db/search/xq/searchMfer02.xq?_id=loc.mss.eadmss.ms012135&_faSection=overview&_faSubsection=did&_dmdid=

Address
9 Henrietta Street
Covent Garden
London
WC2E 8PX
United Kingdom
Date Opened
Friday, January 1, 1897

Person TypeIndividual

Last Updated8/7/24

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