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Thacker, Spink & Company was an Indian publishing house, bookshop,[1] stationers and printers[2] headquartered in Calcutta (now Kolkata), India.[3] It was founded in 1851[4] and issued books of Indian interest for both the general public and the educational market as well as a range of journals, maps and postcards. The firm published Rudyard Kipling's first two books in 1886 and 1888.[5]

Company history

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Exterior view of the building of Thacker, Spink & Co., publishers, Calcutta (Kolkata), c.1890

Thacker, Spink & Co. (operated by an East India Company surgeon William Thacker in partnership with his nephew William Spink,[6] JP, of Calcutta) was the Indian branch of William Thacker & Co. of 2, Newgate Street, London and it also had a branch, Thacker and Co., in Bombay (now Mumbai) and another at Simla.[7] The firm succeeded an earlier publishing firm, Thacker and Company, which traded in Calcutta under its proprietor William Thacker (1791–1872)[8] from circa 1818 until 1851.[9]

In 1878 Thacker, Spink was located at "5 and 6, Government Place, Calcutta"[10] (in the vicinity of the Esplanade, Kolkata). Evan Cotton states that the firm remained at Government Place North until 1916 when it removed to a palatial "five storey block"[6] at No. 3 Esplanade East.[11] This is confirmed by Montague Massey.[12] However, Abhijit Gupta has stated that in the 1880s the firm moved to College Street, Calcutta, which was then and remains the centre of the city's book trade, with its neighbours including the Calcutta School-Book Society, Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar's Sanskrit Press and Depository, S. K. Lahiri and Gurudas Chattopadhyay.[13]

Thacker, Spink published Thacker's Bengal Directory from 1864 until 1884, whose coverage included the Bengal Presidency and parts of present-day Myanmar and Bangladesh. In 1885 the work was renamed Thacker's Indian Directory with a coverage of all of British India.[14]

The firm published books for the general trade, with a "considerable list of specialized books on India, its administration, religions, topography, flora and fauna",[15] along with travel guides, books on equestrianism, cookery, and other popular nonfiction topics. It also had "an extensive list of law books and text books".[15] It launched Peary Charan Sarkar's Books of Reading (Reading Books), a book series for the Indian school market. In 1875 the British publisher, Macmillan & Company, realizing the increasingly profitable market of textbook publishing in India, acquired the series from Thacker, Spink.[16][17][18]

Thacker, Spink published Rudyard Kipling's first books, Departmental Ditties and Other Verses (1886)[19] and Plain Tales from the Hills (1888).

Thacker, Spink's staff over the years included Tom Thacker who corresponded with Kipling and Edmund Hunt Dring (1863–1928), who later became managing director of Bernard Quaritch Ltd., Antiquarian Booksellers, London.[20][21]

In 1931, the British firm, William Thacker & Co., was declared bankrupt, and Thacker, Spink & Company passed into the ownership of the Sengupta family.[3]

Book series

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  • Calcutta Oriental Series[22]
  • The Commando Books[23]
  • The Rampart Library of Good Reading[24]
  • Thacker's Dumpy Books for Children
  • Thacker's Hand-books of Hindostan[25]

Journals

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Journals being published by Thacker, Spink in 1905[26] included:

  • The Agricultural Journal of India
  • The Empress
  • The Indian and Eastern Engineer
  • The Indian Medical Gazette
  • The Journal of Tropical Veterinary Science

References

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  1. ^ The Bengal Directory 1881, Thacker, Spink & Co., 1881. Retrieved 12 January 2025.
  2. ^ Thomas Pinney and David Alan Richards, eds., Kipling and His First Publisher: Correspondence of Rudyard Kipling with Thacker, Spink and Co., 1886–1890, Rivendale Press, 2001, p. 7.
  3. ^ a b Rimi B. Chatterjee, Thacker, Spink & Co., oxfordreference.com. Retrieved 13 September 2022.
  4. ^ Victoria Condie, "Thacker, Spink and Company: Bookselling and Publishing in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Calcutta", in: Robert Fraser and Mary Hammond, eds, Books Without Borders, Volume 1: The Cross-National Dimension in Print Culture, Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2008, pp. 114.
  5. ^ Thomas Pinney and David Alan Richards, eds., Kipling and His First Publisher: Correspondence of Rudyard Kipling with Thacker, Spink and Co., 1886–1890, Rivendale Press, 2001, passim.
  6. ^ a b Premises of Thacker, Spink & Co., Esplanade Row, 1918, cam.ac.uk. Retrieved 14 January 2025.
  7. ^ Kathleen Blechynden, Calcutta, Past and Present, Calcutta and Simla: Thacker, Spink and Co., 1905, title page. Retrieved 12 January 2025.
  8. ^ FIBIS Journal No. 34, The Families in British India Society, Autumn 2015, p. 5. Retrieved 13 January 2025.
  9. ^ Victoria Condie, "Thacker, Spink and Company: Bookselling and Publishing in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Calcutta", in: Robert Fraser and Mary Hammond, eds, Books Without Borders, Volume 1: The Cross-National Dimension in Print Culture, Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2008, passim.
  10. ^ Publisher's advertisement in: The Bengal Directory 1878, Calcutta: Thacker, Spink & Co., 1878. Retrieved 12 January 2025.
  11. ^ Evan Cotton, "A Famous Calcutta Firm: The History of Thacker Spink and Co.", in: Bengal, Past & Present: Journal of the Calcutta Historical Society, Vol. 41, Issue 81, January-March 1931, p. 164. Retrieved 13 January 2025.
  12. ^ Montague Massey, Recollections of Calcutta for over Half a Century, Calcutta: Thacker, Spink & Company, 1918, p. 95. Retrieved 14 January 2025.
  13. ^ Abhijit Gupta, "College Street", in: Michael F. Suarez and H. R. Woudhuysen, eds., The Oxford Companion to the Book, Oxford University Press, 2010 (online edition). Retrieved 11 January 2025.
  14. ^ Thacker, Spink and Co, geographicus.com. Retrieved 11 January 2025.
  15. ^ a b Thomas Pinney and David Alan Richards, eds., Kipling and His First Publisher: Correspondence of Rudyard Kipling with Thacker, Spink and Co., 1886–1890, Rivendale Press, 2001, p. 7. Retrieved 12 January 2025.
  16. ^ Abhijit Gupta, "The History of the Book in the Indian Subcontinent", in: Michael F. Suarez and H. R. Woudhuysen, eds., The Oxford Companion to the Book, Oxford University Press, 2010 (online edition). Retrieved 11 January 2025.
  17. ^ Charles Morgan, The House of Macmillan (1843–1943), London: Macmillan & Co. Limited, 1943, p. 186. Retrieved 12 January 2025.
  18. ^ Victoria Condie, Macmillan's Early Trade in Educational Books to India, 1873-1891: Disseration Submitted for the Degree of MA in the History of the Book, Institute of English Studies, School of Advanced Studies, University of London, September 2014, unpublished thesis, passim. Retrieved 13 January 2025.
  19. ^ Departmental ditties, and other verses. 3d ed, worldcat.org. Retrieved 12 January 2025.
  20. ^ Material relating to Edmund Hunt Dring, c.1875–1892, becc.bristol.gov.uk. Retrieved 12 January 2025.
  21. ^ Our History, quaritch.com. Retrieved 12 January 2025.
  22. ^ Bimala Churn Law, Historical Gleanings, worldcat.org. Retrieved 12 January 2025.
  23. ^ Commando Books (Thacker & Co.) – Book Series List, publishinghistory.com. Retrieved 30 September 2023.
  24. ^ se:Rampart library of good reading, worldcat.org. Retrieved 12 January 2025.
  25. ^ se:Thacker's hand-books of Hindostan, worldcat.org. Retrieved 12 January 2025.
  26. ^ Publisher's advertisement in final pages of Calcutta, Past and Present, Thacker, Spink & Co., 1905. Retrieved 12 January 2025.

Further reading

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