A small London publisher's gamble on a rejected manuscript changed its fortunes
For most of its early life Bloomsbury was a minor name in British publishing. Then in 1997 it took a chance on a children's fantasy series that several other publishers had already turned down. That series was Harry Potter, and decades later much of the profit in Bloomsbury's children's division still comes from it.
Nigel Newton, who had worked at other publishing houses, founded the company in 1986. It floated on the London Stock Exchange in 1994 at a valuation of £9 million, a modest figure for a firm that would later join the FTSE 250 index. Its head office sits on Bedford Square in the Bloomsbury district of Camden, the neighbourhood that gave it its name.
Success paid for expansion. A share issue in 1998 raised £6.1 million, used largely to set up Bloomsbury USA in New York that same year as a general publisher of adult and children's books. A dedicated American list for young readers followed in 2002, and in 2005 it bought Walker and Company, a small nonfiction publisher whose brand was later retired in 2015. The American arm built a reputation for literary fiction and serious nonfiction, including Anthony Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential and the works of Abdulrazak Gurnah, winner of the 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature.
Academic publishing became a major growth engine. Bloomsbury's American business bought ABC-CLIO, an established print and digital academic publisher, for $22.9 million in 2021, then in 2024 completed an $83 million purchase of Rowman and Littlefield's academic assets, which doubled the size of its academic and professional divisions in the United States.
International ventures came and went. In December 2008 the company opened a branch in Doha in partnership with the Qatar Foundation, publishing English and Arabic literature, and in 2010 the pair launched an open access journals venture. The partnership ended in December 2015, by which point the Qatari publishing house had produced over 200 books, all absorbed into the Qatari-owned HBKU Press. Bloomsbury opened an Indian office in 2012. In May 2023 it drew attention when a UK edition of one of its novels was reported to carry an AI-generated cover image.
Source: Bloomsbury Publishing
