John Cassell began a small publishing business in London in 1848 to publish temperance and other literature for public instruction and improvement. In subsequent decades the firm expanded rapidly into publishing entertaining and informative material in periodical and book form. With the introduction of illustrations into its publications, Cassell became the publisher of hugely popular magazines which combined a winning formula of pictures, popular non-fiction, humour, puzzles, craft, and melodramatic serial fiction. Novels published in parts were often republished as illustrated books, and the firm also issued pictorial editions of religious and secular classics.
For a period in the early twentieth century the company appeared to lose its ability to gauge popular taste and lost market dominance, but regained ground with the revival of popular fiction magazines and the publication of text books, children's books and reference publications. From 1927 the firm ceased publishing periodicals and concentrated on book publication. There followed a period of growth and achievement, in which the firm achieved a brilliant literary list, and also published successfully in the areas of history, reference, autobiography and sport. By the 1970s it was predominantly a publisher of reference works, notably dictionaries.
The ownership of Cassell has changed many times. From 1855 printers Petter and Galpin bought in as partners, and this is reflected in the business name until 1883, when the firm was incorporated as Cassell and Company Limited. It was purchased by William and Gomer Berry in 1920, then bought back by the literary editor, W. Newman Flower, in 1927. After the Flower family sold a controlling interest in the company to Macmillan in 1969 it operated as Cassell and Collier Macmillan until 1978, when it became Cassell Limited. The company was absorbed into CBS Publishing Europe in 1982. It was bought by a London consortium in 1986 and became Cassell PLC, then taken over in 1998 by the Orion Publishing Group. When that group became part of Hachette Livre Cassell was moved into the Octopus Publishing Group, also owned by Hachette.
As part of the Octopus Publishing Group, Cassell continued to publish a range of popular non-fiction under the imprint Cassell Illustrated.
