Rapid growth came with works by Marie Corelli, Hilaire Belloc, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Oscar Wilde (De Profundis, 1905)[2] as well as Edgar Rice Burroughs' Tarzan of the Apes.
[4] The company published the 1920 English translation of Albert Einstein's Relativity, the Special and the General Theory: A Popular Exposition.
With knowledge he had gained of children's literature at the publisher Grant Richards, E. V. Lucas built on the company's early success.
A Fairy Play in Six Acts by Maurice Maeterlinck (Nobel Prize in Literature 1911) in an English translation by Alexander Teixeira de Mattos.
[5] By the 1920s, it had also a literary list that included Anthony Hope, G. K. Chesterton, Henry James, D. H. Lawrence, T. S. Eliot, Ruth Manning-Sanders and The Arden Shakespeare series.
[3] It is thought that one reason for the firm's failure to support Lawrence was that he had at the time written an unkind portrait of the chief editor's brother, who had recently been killed in France.
His commercial judgment added authors Enid Blyton, P. G. Wodehouse, Pearl S. Buck and Maurice Maeterlinck to the company's list.
Methuen altered their editions of Tintin by insisting that books featuring British characters undergo major changes.
Methuen Children's Books, under the leadership of Olive Jones, Charles Shirley and Marilyn Malin, has been described as "an outward-looking company whose sense of identity was enhanced by bright design, a keen marketing drive, and a strong European flavour".
When ABP was acquired by the Thomson Organization in 1987, it sold off the trade publishing units, including Methuen, to Reed International's Octopus.