Subjects:

Legal History, General Interest, Wildy, Simmonds and Hill

Contents:

Foreward

Author's Preface

1. The Trust

2. The Bond Empire

3. The Successors

4. The Quiescent Fifties

5. The Turbulant Sixties

6. The Takeover

Acknowledgements

The history of Butterworths, England's leading law publisher, falls into four parts - the 19th century when it was sedately and modestly run by its eponymous founders; the first four decades of the 20th century when it was dynamically built by Stanley Bond; the thirty-five years following Bond's death in 1943, when the company was owned by the Bond Family Trust; and the years since 1965 when Butterworths/LexisNexis became a division of the International Publishing Corporation, which later became Reed International and latterly Reed Elsevier. This book covers the third of these four periods.

Stanley Bond, a largely unrecognised publishing genius, instructed in his will that his two infant sons should inherit the company when they attained the age of twenty-five. until then the company should be run by a Trust, which he set up, most of the income from which would go to his widow. The sons never got their inheritance. The company was sold twenty-four years after Bond's death. How this came about is a story of intrigue and power plays, in researching which the author had access to confidential archives and was able to interview witnesses of the drama. The result is a tale that throws light on the mores of privately-run companies sliding unwillingly into the era of corporate ownership.