The Series as Commodity: Marketing T. Fisher Unwin’s Pseudonym and Autonym Libraries

Abstract

The Pseudonym and Autonym Libraries were distinctively packaged novelettes that caught the attention of late nineteenth-century British and American audiences and attracted imitators on both sides of the Atlantic. Their publisher, T. Fisher Unwin, was noted as a publisher of both fiction and non-fiction series directed at differing audiences. By 1917 the firm had twenty-eight series in its lists, of which several stood out: the Mermaid series of Restoration and Jacobean plays, the Cameo series of poetry and the Story of the Nations series of histories written by some of the outstanding historians and writers of the day. Thomas Fisher Unwin (1848–1935) apprenticed in 1868 with the publishing firm of Jackson, Walford, and Hodder. Unwin started his own house in 1882, at the age of thirty-four, purchasing Marshall, Japp & Co. for £1,000 and setting up shop in Holborn Viaduct. He later moved to Paternoster Square and then to 1 Adelphi Terrace in 1905. Although the Unwin family were strict Congregationalists, Thomas Fisher Unwin hearkened back to his brewer grandfather and namesake, Fisher Unwin (1776–1819), and enjoyed wine with his meals and Continental culture. He had a liberal outlook that made him a champion of free trade, a pro-Boer and an advocate for Africans in the Congo and for Irish Home Rule. A keen mountaineer, he published books on mountaineering and, when his nephew Stanley Unwin came into the firm, became the distributor of Ordnance Survey maps and Baedeker guides.