Constable, ARCHIBALD

Constable, ARCHIBALD, publisher, was born at Carnbee, Fife, 24th February 1774, and became a bookseller's apprentice in Edinburgh (1788-95). He then started as a bookseller at the Cross of Edinburgh, and speedily gathered round him the chief book-collectors of the time. He gradually drifted into the publishing business, secured the copyright of the Scots Magazine in 1801, and was chosen as the publisher of the afterwards famous Edinburgh Review. He published for all the leading men of the time, and his quick appreciation of the merits of the works of Sir Walter Scott became the envy and wonder of the book-trade. There were several business partners in the career of Constable & Co., but Archibald Constable was from first to last the mainspring of the concern. Had painstaking business qualities kept pace with his shrewdness and large-minded literary transactions, business calamities might have been averted. 'Among all his myriad of undertakings, I question,' says Lockhart, 'if any one that really originated with himself, and continued to be superintended by his own care, ever did fail.' In 1812 he purchased for between £13,000 and £14,000 the copyright of the Encyclopædia Britannica. In the commercial crisis of 1826 Constable & Co. failed, the liabilities amounting to upwards of a quarter of a million. The only noteworthy publishing scheme of Constable after this failure was the issue of his celebrated Miscellany. He died July 21, 1827. See Archibald Constable and his Literary Correspondents, by his son, Thomas Constable (1873).