CHRIS KOENIG mourns the passing of an iconic Oxford publisher out of local hands after nearly a century

A momentous event in the history of Oxford, both town and gown, passed almost unnoticed earlier this year; on February 5 to be precise. It was the sale of Blackwell Publishing to American company John Wiley for £572m, an event which took the great publishing house out of the hands of its founding family (and therefore out of local hands) after nearly 100 years.

Publishers come and go (some in more spectacular fashion than others - remember Robert Maxwell) or they meld and unmeld with each other, but somehow Blackwell always seemed to defy such trends.

All the same, looking at the history of the family firm is like looking at the history of how ideas have been communicated since Victorian times. Thank God, some might say, that only the publishing business has been sold and the bookshop, from which it evolved, remains in family hands.

Benjamin Henry Blackwell opened the flagship bookshop in Broad Street, Oxford, in 1879, though his father, Benjamin Harris Blackwell, had first become an Oxford bookseller way back in 1846. And it was he who introduced the idea, now universally accepted, of allowing customers to browse at will among the bookshelves - an idea, incidentally, taken further by Robert Maxwell in the 1970s when he opened a short-lived and unsuccessful bookshop on the Plain, Oxford, where browsers were also supplied with cups of coffee.

With the benefit of hindsight, it is easy to see that Blackwell's bookshop in Broad Street arrived on the Oxford scene at exactly the right moment: shortly after the great Oxford University reforms instituted by Gladstone, which spelled harder work for undergraduates than during the riotous old days; a process which inevitably involved buying books.

But it was Sir Basil Henry Blackwell, son of Benjamin Henry, born above the famous Broad Street shop in 1889, who promoted the publishing side of the business alongside the bookshop. After Magdalen College School and Merton, his father, who had himself started his bookish career as a shilling-a-week publishing apprentice, sent him off to join Oxford University Press at Amen Corner in London.

He rejoined his father back in Oxford in 1913. For the next 11 years (he was rejected as a soldier on account of his poor eyesight) he worked as a publisher, not a bookseller. But on the death of his father in 1924 he had to work as both publisher and seller.

In 1920, together with Bernard Newdigate, he had taken over the Shakespeare Head Press in Stratford-upon-Avon. In 1929, the Press moved from Stratford to Oxford.

Sadly, it closed in 1942, thanks to the Second World War, but in the 1930s the seeds of the huge modern business of producing scientific journals had been sown with the advent of Blackwell Scientific Publications Ltd.

He would probably have been fascinated by the changes that have come about in 'information delivery' courtesy of the electronic revolution, which really took off shortly after his death in 1984. But he might well have been sad that it resulted in the sale of the business. He had always been proud of the family keeping control.

Known as the Gaffer throughout the book trade, Sir Basil was prodigiously well-read. He was also scrupulously honest and was active in stamping out unethical practices. When in the 1950s 'rings' operated in antiquarian book auctions, he fought them tooth and nail.

He also stood up in court at the Old Bailey obscenity trial of Last Exit to Brooklyn and said that the book had depraved him. Whatever would he have thought of Robert Maxwell, had he lived to see his downfall.