Blackwell's Bookshop Oxford

Blackwell's was established in 1879 by Benjamin Henry Blackwell on Broad Street in Oxford, beginning as a small bookstore that soon expanded to occupy surrounding buildings.

The company's publishing arm produced its first work, Mensæ Secundæ, in 1897, featuring verses by Henry Beeching.

Basil Blackwell, the first of his family to attend university, joined the family business in 1913 after an apprenticeship in London to focus on expanding the firm's publishing operations.

The publishing company and the main retail business were merged into a single entity in 1921.

The Norrington Room, a vast subterranean space extending beneath Trinity College, was opened in 1966. It contained three miles of shelving and was recognized by the Guinness Book of Records as the largest single room for selling books at the time.

In 1995, Blackwell's became the first bookshop in the United Kingdom to enable customers to purchase titles through an online catalogue.

The company expanded its UK footprint by taking over the Heffers chain of bookshops in Cambridge in 1999.

Blackwell's further expanded its reach in 2002 by acquiring the academic bookshops of the Scottish chain James Thin.

The Blackwell publishing imprint was sold to John Wiley & Sons in 2007 for £572 million, resulting in the creation of the Wiley-Blackwell brand.

Following a period of financial losses, Toby Blackwell announced in 2009 that wealth shares in the company would be distributed among staff to create an employee-owned partnership.

The long-standing family-owned business was acquired by the UK book chain Waterstones in February 2022.