Bowes & Bowes

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Bowes & Bowes was a celebrated bookselling and publishing company based in Cambridge, England. It was established by Robert Bowes (1835–1919), a nephew of Daniel Macmillan (1813–1857 — the founder, with his brother Alexander, in 1843, of Macmillan & Co., another successful bookshop in Cambridge). The company became known as ‘Bowes & Bowes’ only in 1907, following George Brimley Bowes’s (Robert Bowes’s son’s) becoming a partner in the firm in 1899. The firm continued as a family business until 1953 when it was acquired by W H Smith, who continued to operate it under the original name until 1986. In that year the business’s name was changed to Sherratt & Hughes. Although the Sherratt & Hughes shop no longer exists, the site (1 Trinity Street, Cambridge, England) has since 1992 been the home of the Cambridge University Press bookshop.

In its heyday the firm’s backlist included the names of Erich Heller, who was also the general editor of a series of books published by Bowes & Bowes (‘Studies in Modern European Literature and Thought’, some of which were printed in the Netherlands) and by far their most prestigious author, and of Edwin Keppel Bennett.