1926 Joseph Mallaby Dent was born in 1849 in Darlington, the tenth child of a house-painter. Having been apprenticed as a printer – in which trade he showed little skill – young Joseph went to London in 1867, where he set up shop in the book business (principally bookbinding, at which he had much skill).
Dent was moderately prosperous, but in 1887 his property burned down and, in his rebuilt premises, he launched Dent & Co. in 1888. In the 1890s, he established himself as one of the more energetic of the new generation of British publishers. By this stage he had already raised the standards of the binding and illustration of popular books. In this decade, Dent put out the 40-volume ‘Temple Shakespeare’, edited by Israel Gollancz, with title-pages illustrated by Walter Crane, at one shilling a volume. As Jonathan Rose records in his Oxford Dictionary of National Biography essay on Dent, ‘the series was to sell 5 million copies over the next forty years’.
Always passionate about cheap series reprints (especially of fiction – he was, from childhood, a passionate lover of Scott), Dent, in collaboration with Ernest Rhys, established the Everyman Library in 1906. The first volume was Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson, which Dent had first come across, aged 15, in a chapel mutual improvement society.
The Universal Education Act of 1870 had brought into play a whole new constituency of readers – most of them unable to afford the high price of new books or of commercial library subscription. The initial aim of the Everyman project was to put, and keep, in print 1,000 of the classic works of world literature, at one shilling a volume (150 were published in the first year; the thousandth title did not see the light of print until 1956). It was Rhys who proposed the epigraph, published on the flyleaf of every volume (from the medieval morality play, Everyman):
Everyman, I will go with thee
and be thy guide,
In thy most need to go
by thy side.
Particular attention was paid to the bindings and endpapers of J.M. Dent books – he was among the first London publishers to have an instantly recognisable ‘house style’. Despite the superior production, and the low cost, the series was phenomenally successful. Dent was obliged to build a new printing house (the Temple Press) to meet demand.
As Rose records:
Dent has been criticized for his over-reverent, conservative, petit bourgeois tastes in literature. (He always pronounced it litter-chah, his employee Frank Swinnerton recalled.) Since the early Everyman volumes were reprints of out-of-copyright texts, they inevitably represented the standard canon of Greek, Roman, English, American, and western European classics. By 1956 the firm’s editorial director admitted that many of the Victorian war-horses had already become anachronisms. With puritanical fastidiousness, Dent blocked the admission of Tobias Smollett and Moll Flanders to Everyman’s Library. Yet in other respects the series was remarkably inclusive, embracing the Russian classics, the great books of India, and an impressive range of female novelists. (Dent himself wrote the introduction to Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford, one of his personal favourites.) A Liberal nonconformist, Dent was inspired by an almost religious mission to bring culture to the masses.
By the time of Dent’s death, on 9 May 1926, 20 million Everyman volumes had been sold. The series, after many mutations, survives.