J.M. Dent & Co.

LC name authority rec. #no2008053834

LC Heading: J. M. Dent & Co.

Biography: Dent, Joseph Malaby (1849–1926), publisher.

"....Dent set up his own London shop in Hoxton in 1872, and in 1881 he moved to larger premises at 69 Great Eastern Street, but that plant burnt down on new year's day 1888. The insurance money allowed him to rebuild, and the following autumn J. M. Dent & Co. ventured into publishing. Dent had often been struck by the contrast between his handsome leather bindings and the spindly Victorian type on the pages they enclosed; he now embarked on a crusade to raise standards of book production. He published the Temple Library, starting with Charles Lamb's Essays of Elia, edited by Augustine Birrell, with etchings by Herbert Railton. This series of limited editions, produced on handmade paper, won both commercial success and the endorsement of the antiquarian bookseller Bernard Quaritch. In 1889 Dent put out an edition of The Canterbury Tales with hand-coloured illustrations; then he turned to uniform editions of the great English novelists. A trip to Florence and Siena in 1890 inspired the Mediaeval Towns series: illustrated books about the historic cities of Europe. There followed in 1893–4 a magnificent edition of Sir Thomas Malory's The Birth, Life and Acts of King Arthur, with about 300 illustrations by the nineteen-year-old Aubrey Beardsley.

Dent recognized an enormous potential demand for cheap classics among self-educated readers. He was secretary of the Shakespeare Society at the Toynbee Hall settlement house, where the members had to cope with a confusing variety of editions, most of them badly edited and without helpful critical apparatus. Between 1894 and 1896 he produced the forty-volume Temple Shakespeare, edited by Israel Gollancz, with title-pages by Walter Crane, all for 1s. a volume; the series was to sell 5 million copies over the next forty years. There followed the Temple Dramatists, editions of other Elizabethan and Jacobean playwrights; the Temple Biographies; the Temple Greek and Latin Classics; English Men of Science; a forty-volume translation of Balzac's Comédie humaine; as well as multi-volume Temple editions of Fielding, Scott, Dickens, Hugo, Thackeray, and Hazlitt. There was even a Temple Bible in thirty-one volumes. Dent's list was not, however, limited to the classics. He also published contemporary writing by Maurice Hewlett, H. G. Wells, Henryk Sienkiewicz, Bernhard Berenson, Edward Thomas, John Masefield, Henry James, Padraic Colum, George Santayana, Mary Webb, and the later works of Joseph Conrad and W. H. Hudson, as well as children's books by Kate Greenaway and Edith Nesbit. The Temple Primers series popularized academic subjects for lay readers.

In 1906 Dent began his greatest project, a 1000-volume uniform edition of world literature, selling for 1s. a volume. His editor was Ernest Rhys, who proposed the name Everyman's Library. Cheap classic reprints were by no means a new concept—Rhys himself had earlier edited the 1s. Camelot Classics for the Newcastle publisher Walter Scott—but Everyman's Library was unprecedented in its breadth, coherence, and beautiful design. Reginald Knowles designed the bindings, endpapers, and title-pages in the manner of William Morris. A hand-lettered title and a distinctive floral ornament were stamped on the spine in gold. The demand for Everyman's Library was so great that Dent had to build the Temple Press, a vast new production facility at Letchworth Garden City. In 1911 the firm moved to imposing new offices at 10–13 Bedford Street, Covent Garden, London. Having invested so much capital in his Letchworth plant, Dent could be stingy with his workers, authors, and editors. Rhys, for instance, had to work at breakneck speed to prepare new volumes for publication (152 in the first year), and at first earned only 3 guineas per volume. But Dent was a capitalist with an entirely genuine commitment to quality: when one of the first Everyman volumes, Lamb's Essays of Elia, fell short of his aesthetic standards, he had the entire print run destroyed.

Dent has been criticized for his over-reverent, conservative, petit bourgeois tastes in literature. (He always pronounced it litterchah, his employee Frank Swinnerton recalled.) Since the early Everyman volumes were reprints of out-of-copyright texts, they inevitably represented the standard canon of Greek, Roman, English, American, and western European classics. By 1956 the firm's editorial director admitted that many of the Victorian war-horses had already become anachronisms. With puritanical fastidiousness, Dent blocked the admission of Tobias Smollett and Moll Flanders to Everyman's Library. Yet in other respects the series was remarkably inclusive, embracing the Russian classics, the great books of India, and an impressive range of female novelists. (Dent himself wrote the introduction to Elizabeth Gaskell's Cranford, one of his personal favourites.) A Liberal nonconformist, Dent was inspired by an almost religious mission to bring culture to the masses. As a member of the Toynbee Hall education committee, he organized a Sunday afternoon concert series that ran in Whitechapel for thirty years. From 1902 he served on the council of the British and Foreign School Society, and he was a strong supporter of Margaret McMillan's nursery school movement.

In 1912 Dent launched Everyman, a penny literary weekly. It was a failure, partly as a result of quarrels with the editor, Charles Sarolea. The First World War slowed the publication of new Everyman's Library volumes to a near standstill, and wartime inflation forced the series to raise its prices and economize on ornamentation. Dent was devastated by the loss of two sons, Paxton and Austen, in the war; significantly, the first work of twentieth-century literature published in Everyman's Library was Henri Barbusse's devastating war novel Le feu, translated as Under Fire.

J. M. Dent's sons Hugh and Jack Dent and Jack's son, F. J. Martin Dent, all assumed managerial roles in the family firm. J. M. Dent retired in 1924, and died of heart failure at his home, Cromhamleigh, Harewood Road, south Croydon, on 9 May 1926. He was buried in Sanderstead churchyard, Surrey. Everyman's Library did not reach volume 1000 until 1956, but Dent had lived to see total sales exceed 20 million."

Jonathan Rose

(“Dent, Joseph Malaby (1849–1926),” Jonathan Rose in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, eee online ed., ed. Lawrence Goldman, Oxford: OUP, 2004, .Accessed August 19, 2015. www.oxforddnb.com)