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The Seven Lives of John Murray: The Story of a Publishing Dynasty
 
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The Seven Lives of John Murray: The Story of a Publishing Dynasty (Hardcover)

by Humphrey Carpenter (Author)
5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
RRP: £25.00
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Product details

  • Hardcover: 384 pages
  • Publisher: John Murray (10 Jul 2008)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 0719565324
  • ISBN-13: 978-0719565328
  • Product Dimensions: 23.4 x 15.4 x 3.8 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
  • Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 426,991 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Product Description

Review

‘Humphrey Carpenter’s history of the firm, completed by other hands after his death in 2005, is an evocation of a vanished age’

(Jeremy Lewis, Daily Telegraph )


‘A treasure-trove of fascinating information paced into Humphrey Carpenter’s riveting history of the world’s longest surviving publishing house ...Terrific’  

(Val Hennessy, Daily Mail )

'The late Humphrey Carpenter, a delightful and generous-minded man to whose memory I doff my cap, died while still at work on the manuscript of Seven Lives'

(Independent on Sunday )

‘The highs and lows of the literary world are reported with panache in this fascinating book. Superb photographs too’

(Tatler )


Product Description

From the burning of Byron's memoirs, Jane Austen's clipped businesslike manner, and the lucrative controversy caused by the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species, through to the discovery of the new young poet John Betjeman, the name John Murray has for more than two hundred years been synonymous with challenging, intelligent and progressive publishing.


 


From its birth in 1768, when the first John Murray of Edinburgh came down to London, each of its seven leaders has made his own contribution to the dissemination of literature and the understanding of the world. One became Byron's publisher and confidante; another began the revolutionary series of Murray handbooks which transformed world travel in the early years of the railways; a third broke controversial new ground with the publication of Queen Victoria's letters. So the tradition progressed to the end of the twentieth century, and a list of literary giants including Patrick Leigh Fermor, Osbert Lancaster, Fransoise Sagan and Poet Laureate, John Betjeman. Written in Carpenter's rollicking and iconoclastic style, it is an affectionate and vibrant account of the longest-surviving publishing house in the world.

(20080711)
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5.0 out of 5 stars The last great British publishing house, 12 Aug 2009
By Roger Johnson (Chelmsford, England) - See all my reviews
Humphrey Carpenter, who died in 2005 aged fifty-eight, was a jazz musician, a writer of children's books, and a radio producer and presenter - he fronted "The Secret History of Conan Doyle" during Radio 4's Conan Doyle Week in July 2000. He was also a perceptive, scrupulous and thoroughly engaging biographer, whose subjects included JRR Tolkien, Ezra Pound, Benjamin Britten and Spike Milligan. His last book, completed posthumously by Candida Brazil and James Hamilton, is "The Seven Lives of John Murray: The Story of a Publishing Dynasty, 1768-2002", published, most appropriately, by John Murray. At the time of its sale to Hodder Headline, Murray's was Britain's oldest and most respected independent publishing house, having been run for 234 years by seven generations of John Murrays. Their authors included Jane Austen, Walter Scott, Charles Darwin, David Livingstone, Washington Irving, Freya Stark, Patrick Leigh Fermor, Osbert Lancaster, John Betjeman, Françoise Sagan, Kenneth Clark... and, most notably, Lord Byron. Oh, and Queen Victoria. And Arthur Conan Doyle, whose publisher, Smith Elder, was taken over just before the Great War. John Murray VI ("Jock") remembered: "During one of my holidays from school, when my grandfather [John Murray IV, then in his last years] was ill, Conan Doyle called in with new stories, which we published as 'The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes' in 1927. He treated me with such courtesy as though I was a grown-up... that I fell under his spell. If this is an author, I said to myself, what fun to be a publisher!" A later memory was of Adrian Conan Doyle, "turning up at Albemarle Street dressed in chainmail, demanding the pistols owned by Sir John Moore, the hero of the Battle of Corunna, which had come into the possession of John Murray II"... I in turn remember Jock Murray as a regular attender at the Sherlock Holmes Society of London's annual dinners in the early 1970s, the guest, I think, of Lord Donegall. "The Seven Lives of John Murray" is a fascinating account of the people who made the firm and maintained it during its centuries as a family concern. It's also evidence in itself that the qualities instilled by seven generations of Murrays still flourish.

Roger Johnson, Editor of "The Sherlock Holmes Journal"
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