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FIRST EDITION

True Stories for Children

Seeley, Service was a British publishing firm. It was established in 1744 and ceased business over two centuries later, in 1979. During most of the twentieth century the “well established” Seeley, Service was second only to Longman as Britain’s oldest active publishing firm. In 1886 it was described by The Publishers’ Circular as having a reputation for “taste and elegance”.

In 1744 Benton Seeley, a bookseller in Stowe, Buckinghamshire published the first Seeley book: the Description of the Gardens of Lord Viscount Cobham, at Stow in Buckinghamshire. The gardens, now known as Stowe Landscape Gardens, were “much visited and publicized” and had “enormous influence on garden design, especially after experiments there in ‘natural’ gardening in the 1730s”. The Seeley guidebook went through several editions until a final edition of 1827 and did much to “spread the influence of Stowe as a model for the English landscape garden“.

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the firm published books in various fields including travel and religion (particularly on Protestant Christianity).

Robert Benton Seeley (1798–1886), a leading figure in the Church Influence Society, one of the founders of the Church Pastoral Aid Society and of the Society for Improving the Condition of the Labouring Classes, and a supporter of Shaftesbury‘s campaign for factory acts, operated the firm in the mid-19th century under the name of Seeley, Jackson and Halliday. His son was the historian and political essayist Sir John Robert Seeley.

In the final decades of the nineteenth century Agnes Giberne‘s books of popular science were published by Seeley, Jackson, and Halliday and later by Seeley & Co., including Sun, Moon and Stars: Astronomy for Beginners (1879) which had sold 26,000 copies by 1903.

In 1911 the firm’s offerings were described as “high-class works of art, religious, educational, and general”.

In 1970 Seeley, Service merged with Leo Cooper Ltd., a firm which specialised in publishing “regimental histories, escape stories and war memoirs”, to form Seeley, Service & Cooper, which then went into receivership in 1979 and was acquired by Frederick Warne.