- Hardcover: 384 pages
- Publisher: John Murray; First Edition edition (10 July 2008)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0719565324
- ISBN-13: 978-0719565328
- Product Dimensions: 23.4 x 15 x 4.1 cm
- Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 866,556 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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'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 20080707 '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 20080711 '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 20080711 'The highs and lows of the literary world are reported with panache in this fascinating book. Superb photographs too' -- Tatler 20080711
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.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
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"
Roger Johnson, Editor of "The Sherlock Holmes Journal"
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
1 review
A Wonderful Look at Two Centuries of British Publishing
31 Mar 2009
Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase
This is just a wonderfully informal and informative look at the history of John Murray publishers, first established in London in 1768. The seven lives referred to in the title are the successive John Murrays who headed the house until it was acquired in 2002 by Hodder Headline, though it still is somewhat independent. The history of the book has become a hot topic in recent years, and although this is not an academic treatise, it is just full of information. The famous authors published by Murray seem endless, including Lord Byron, Darwin, Dr. Livingstone, John Betjeman, Freya Stark and Kenneth Clark just to name a few. Murray's was also involved in publishing the "Quarterly Review" and the "Cornhill" periodicals. The book was predominantly researched in Murray's own extensive archives, which were acquired by the National Library of Scotland for over 31 million pounds in 2005, which attests to the historical interest that attaches to the history of the firm. The history of British publishing in the 19th and 20th centuries affords invaluable insights into the intellectual history of the period, and Murray was at the center of it all. Now the reader can be as well.
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