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| LONGMANIn publishing few names are as venerable as Longman. The company goes back to 1724 with important reference, education and other works. Enduring characters in Longman's repertoire include include Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Robert Southey's Goldilocks and the Three Bears. Today the Longman name continues in the Addison Wesley Longman unit of the Pearson Higher Education and Professional Group, which is part of Pearson Education, which is the school and college textbook publishing arm of the London-based Pearson media company.Drawn mostly from material supplied by Pearson EducationThe Longman name today has been subsumed inside the giant Pearson media conglomerate, surviving in the company's Addison Wesley Longman unit. But the grand heritage of Longman cannot be obscured. The company was founded in London by Thomas Longman. For two and one-half centuries, until 1972, a Longman family member remained at the helm. Among Thomas Longman's early projects was publishing The Religion of Nature Delineated by William Wollaston in 1725, the first book ever typeset by the important colonial printer Benjamin Franklin. In 1727 Longman publishes Ephraim Chambers' Cyclopaedia: A Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences. This has long been considered the parent of all encyclopedias, including Britannica. Reference books were a Longman mainstay. In 1755 the company published Samuel Johnson's Dictionary of the English Language, the first comprehensive English-language dictionary. An 1832 innovation came with Heath's Keepsake Annual of 1833, the first book to use a dust jacket. In 1834 Longman the first volume of Robert Southey'sThe Doctor. The fourth volume, published in 1837, included the first edition of The Story of the Three Bears. In this version Goldilocks was a little old woman. The edition was noted for its typeface, which varied in size depending upon which bear was speaking. Papa Bear spoke in large boldface, Baby Bear in a smaller typeface. Southey's The Doctor was published in seven volumes over the next 12 years. (Note: In 1844 Longman published William Henry Fox Talbot's The Pencil of Nature. This pioneer of photography wrote about his methods of producing photographs. This text, long considered to be the single most important book of photographs, was the first commercially published book ever illustrated without the aid of an artist. Longman published the first edition of Roget's Thesaurus in 1852. Longman published the first edition of Gray's Anatomy in 1863. In 1886 Longman published R.L. Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. In 1935 Longman published the first English Language Teaching dictionary. Longman became a public company in 1947. In 1968 Longman became part of Pearson, the London-based international media company. The death of Mark Longman in 1972 marked the end of the Longman legacy as head of the company. In 1985 Longman-Uganda created primary courses for an entire national system of education. In 1994 Longman published the Longman Interactive English Dictionary, the first English Language Teaching dictionary on CD-ROM. Also in 1994 Longman launches the "Look Ahead," multimedia series to teach the world English, with the BBC and the British Council. 1995 Addison-Wesley, which had been purchased by Pearson in 1988, was merged with Longman Publishing to create Addison Wesley Longman. This was the first in a number of Pearson realignments of its U.S. education publishing operations. In 1996 Addison Wesley Longman acquires HarperCollins Educational Publishers, which was folded into AWL's Higher Education Publishing Group. In 1998 Pearson purchased the education operations of Simon & Schuster, which included Allyn &: Bacon and Prentice Hall. These all were consolidated into the Pearson Higher Education and Professional Group in 1999 and relocated in 2001 into two buildings, one of them new, in the Back Bay district of Boston. The Longman name was retained in the Addison Wesley Longman imprint, but titles and lists were shifted among the related companies to streamline marketing.
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