Hodder & Stoughton

Matthew Hodder went to work at fourteen for Jackson and Walford, official publishers to the Congregational Union; the firm became Jackson, Walford and Hodder in 1861, and when the older partners retired in 1868 Thomas Wilberforce Stoughton joined and the house took the name Hodder and Stoughton.¹ It was a Nonconformist religious publisher first and a commercial one second: its Expositor's Bible series carried George Adam Smith's Isaiah, among the earliest English works to accept multiple authorship of that book.¹ The general list then grew fast — the Yellow Jackets of the 1920s, forerunners of the paperback, carried John Buchan, Edgar Wallace and Sapper's Bulldog Drummond, and from 1928 Leslie Charteris's Saint novels appeared under the imprint.¹ Hodder bought New English Library in 1981 and the academic house Edward Arnold in 1987, was itself bought by Headline in 1993 to form Hodder Headline, passed to W H Smith in 1999, and has belonged to Hachette since 2004.¹