Two brothers from Arran built the house that published Alice and Nature
Daniel and Alexander Macmillan grew up on the Scottish island of Arran and opened a bookselling business in 1843. Within a few decades their firm had published Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, launched the science journal Nature and signed Thomas Hardy. One of Daniel's grandsons later became Britain's prime minister, then went back to chair the firm.
The brothers divided the work neatly. Daniel, who had learned the trade assisting a Cambridge bookseller, ran the business side; Alexander built the list. Through the 1850s and 1860s he brought in Charles Kingsley, Christina Rossetti and Matthew Arnold, and first met Lewis Carroll in London in October 1863. Tennyson, Hardy and Kipling followed, and Kipling's The Jungle Book appeared in 1894. Later the house published Yeats, Tagore, Keynes and Margaret Mitchell.
It also created reference works that outlived their founders. Nature began in 1869, and the Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians followed in 1877. An American office opened the same year as Nature, but in 1896 the US business was sold to the Brett family, who ran it as a separate company. The British firm returned to America in 1952 under the name St. Martin's Press, and a Canadian branch lasted from 1905 until 2002.
Harold Macmillan worked in the family firm as a junior partner from 1920 before entering government, served as prime minister from 1957 to 1963, and on leaving politics became chairman in 1964. Since 1999 the company has belonged to the German Holtzbrinck group, and in Britain it trades as Pan Macmillan after merging with Pan Books. It counts as one of the Big Five English-language publishers.
In the digital era it has picked fights. After the iPad was announced in January 2010, Macmillan demanded that Amazon let it set e-book prices; Amazon pulled all its books, then gave in within days. The US government later sued Apple and several publishers, Macmillan among them, for fixing e-book prices, and the case was settled in 2013. A 2019 rule limiting libraries to one copy of new e-books for eight weeks provoked boycotts and was dropped in March 2020.
Source: Macmillan Publishers
