Hutchinson & Co. (Publishers) Ltd.

RA Collection: People and Organisations

Book publisher, founded in London in 1887 by Sir George Hutchinson and later run by his son, Walter Hutchinson (1887–1950). Hutchinson's published books and magazines such as The Lady's Realm, Adventure-story Magazine, Hutchinson's Magazine and Woman.

In the 1920s, Walter Hutchinson published many of the "spook stories" of E.F. Benson in Hutchinson's Magazine and then in collections in a number of books. The company also first published Arthur Conan Doyle's Professor Challenger novels, five novels by mystery writer Harry Stephen Keeler, and short stories by Eden Phillpotts. In 1929, Walter Hutchinson stopped publishing magazines to concentrate on books. In the 1930s, Hutchinson published H.G. Wells's The Bulpington of Blup as well as the first English translations of Vladimir Nabokov's Camera Obscura in 1936 and Despair (translated by Nabokov himself) under its John Long marque of paperbacks.

In 1947 the company launched the Hutchinson University Library book series. The company merged with Century Publishing in 1985 to form Century Hutchinson, and was folded into the British Random House Group in 1989, where it remains as an imprint of Cornerstone Publishing, a publishing house of Penguin Random House UK.