The story
Founded by Frederick Warne in 1865.1
Frederick Warne & Co. was founded in Covent Garden in July 1865 by London bookseller and publisher, Frederick Warne. The business was one successor to Routledge, Warne, Routledge (thus from 1858), the publishing partnership of Warne with his brother-in-law George Routledge and the eldest of Routledge's sons. The other successor was George Routledge & Sons.
During the second half of the nineteenth century, the company built a reputation for publishing children's books, publishing illustrated books by well-known authors and artists as Edward Lear, Kate Greenaway and Walter Crane. The company also published a 'Pictorial' series of books of collections of short essays and illustrations on many non-fiction topics. The following list may not be complete.
Pictorial Cabinet of Marvels
Pictorial Chronicles of the Mighty Deep
Pictorial Museum of Sport and Adventure
Pictorial Records of Remarkable Events
Pictorial Stories of Heroism and Enterprise
Pictorial Travels on Land and Sea
Read the full text
Pictorial Treasury of Famous Men and Famous Deeds
The Pictorial Tour of the World
Another book series, the Warne's Star Series, was being published in the 1880s.
Toward the end of the century, Frederick Warne had retired and left the firm to his three sons, Harold, Fruing and Norman. Warne was among the six publishers to whom Beatrix Potter submitted her first book, the story of a rabbit called Peter. Like the other five firms, Warne turned the proposal down. But the people at the firm changed their minds when they saw the privately published copy in 1901. They said they would publish the book, as long as the illustrations were drawn in colour. The next year, Warne published The Tale of Peter Rabbit, and by Christmas it had sold 20,000 copies. This began a 40-year partnership that saw the publication of 22 additional little books. Beatrix Potter was engaged to marry Norman Warne, her editor and the youngest of the three Warne brothers. However, he died tragically in 1905, only a few weeks after their engagement. Harold, the eldest brother, took over as Potter's editor. She continued to produce one or two new Little Books each year for the next eight years until her marriage in 1913 to William Heelis. During the next few years, Potter turned her attention to her farm work, but when the company fell on hard times and Harold was imprisoned for embezzlement, she came to the rescue with another new title to support "the old firm." Potter, who had no children, left the rights to her works to Warne upon her death. The company continued to publish them; it also brought out several biographical works about its most renowned author. Over the years, Warne also expanded its nonfiction publishing, issuing among others the Observer's Books.
In 1983, Warne was bought by Penguin Books. It began developing classic book-based children's character brands. The merchandising program was expanded from a base of thirty-five licenses to more than four hundred by the late 1990s. Over the years, Warne acquired a variety of other classic books.
A film about the life of Beatrix Potter Miss Potter, starring Renée Zellweger as Beatrix Potter and Ewan McGregor as Norman Warne was released in 2006. While the company no longer exists as an independent company, it continues to exist as an imprint of Penguin Group. The company collaborated with Sony Pictures Animation and Animal Logic to produce the Peter Rabbit film, which was released in 2018.
From Wikipedia’s article on Frederick Warne & Co., shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.4