Spottiswoode

Waking up this morning, I was fussing about the Spottiswoodes, the publisher of the Buxton memoirs of reference 1 being Spottiswoode & Shaw and with my being familiar with Eyre & Spottiswoode, probably owning various books by same.

I now find that Eyre & Spottiswoode were absorbed into Methuen, while Methuen seems to have decomposed with some of it winding up in what is now Penguin Random House. As bad as trying to trace the ancestry of people, but curious readers can go to refrences 2, 3 and 4 - in which last I can find no relevant trace of either Eyre or Spottiswoode.

In any case, a red herring, as along the way I light upon reference 5, available from the Internet Archive, having been digitised from a copy presented to the Library of the University of Toronto. Toronto seems to be big in the world of digitisation as I come across them quite often.

This seems to be the right company, with a Shaw having been a partner in the company - a company with an illustrious history - from 1848 to 1853. With the book of present interest having been published in 1848. The Shaw connection did not, however, survive.

A lot of these partners had their portraits painted by painters of whom I had heard, with the portraits being reproduced in the story. A reminder of the bread and butter work that many painters took on to put the bread and butter on their tables. While others were more ambitious and went in for boiling up stews in pots on the stove.

Then the previous evening (Wednesday), I had been puzzled by the use of the word 'franking' on page 125 of the memoirs themselves. The end of the sentence involved reading '... I should soon be disqualified for franking'. This in connection with Buxton's growing involvement in the slavery question.

Webster's, which lives upstairs, was not much help, but this morning I get to going downstairs for OED. Where I find much longer and more complicated entries for the various uses of 'frank' and its parts. Starting with the ethnic Franks who were free, as opposed to the ethnic Slavs who were not. A bit further on we have the entry about franking letters, the link being that franking secured free passage. In between we have another verb frank, about fattening up animals and by extension to feed greedily. OED only gives a couple of inches to this one, but current thinking is that this is the sense in which Buxton was using the word. Feeding greedily on his country pastimes in Cromer rather than attending to the work of the Lord in London. Maybe with a subconscious connection to the freedom and slavery which were part of that work? 

And that will have to do for now.

PS 1: somewhere along the way, I learned that during the 19th century, sensitive young ladies sometimes made a bit of a parade of not using sugar on account of its then disgraceful provenance. A bit like those late 20th century ladies who made a bit of a parade of not wearing fur. 

PS 2: do the leading Slavs of today, that is to say the Russian ruling classes, harbour some obscure, unconscious chip on their shoulder on account of the servile flavour of their race name?

PS 3: a casual search of the bookcases initially revealed many long gone publishers, but nothing from Eyre & Spottiswoode. I had expected more. But then I lighted upon reference 6, something of a coincidence given that, spinning off from reference 7, I am presently taking another interest in the author. 

References

Reference 1: https://psmv6.blogspot.com/2026/04/more-buxton.html.

Reference 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eyre_%26_Spottiswoode.

Reference 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methuen_Publishing.

Reference 4: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/.

Reference 5: The story of a printing house, being a short account of the Strahans and Spottiswoodes - Spottiswoode & Co. Ltd. - 1912.

Reference 6: The elementary structures of kinship - Lévi-Strauss - 1949. My copy from the 1969 edition from Eyre & Spottiswoode. Translated by J. H. Bell and J. R. von Sturmer. Edited by R. Needham. Signed by the then director of the London School of Economics, one Walter Adams, to be found at reference 8 below.

Reference 7: https://psmv6.blogspot.com/2026/04/more-clans-and-marriages.html.

Reference 8: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Adams_(historian).