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
Thacker, Spink & Co. (operated in partnership with William Spink, JP, 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.[6] The firm succeeded an earlier publishing firm, Thacker and Company, which traded in Calcutta under its proprietor William Thacker (1791–1872)[7] from circa 1818 until 1851.[8]
In 1878 Thacker, Spink was located at "5 and 6, Government Place, Calcutta"[9] (in the vicinity of the Esplanade, Kolkata). Abhijit Gupta states 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.[10] However, Evan Cotton has written that the firm remained at Government Place North until 1916 when it removed to a palatial home at No. 3 Esplanade East.[11]
The firm published books for the general trade, with a "considerable list of specialized books on India, its administration, religions, topography, flora and fauna".[13] It also had "an extensive list of law books and text books".[13] 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.[14][15]
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.[17][18]
In 1931, the British firm, William Thacker & Co., was declared bankrupt, and Thacker, Spink & Company passed into the ownership of the Sengupta family.[3]
^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.
^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.
^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.
^Kathleen Blechynden, Calcutta, Past and Present, Calcutta and Simla: Thacker, Spink and Co., 1905, title page. Retrieved 12 January 2025.
^FIBIS Journal No. 34, The Families in British India Society, Autumn 2015, p. 5. Retrieved 13 January 2025.
^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.
^Publisher's advertisement in: The Bengal Directory 1878, Calcutta: Thacker, Spink & Co., 1878. Retrieved 12 January 2025.
^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.
^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.