During most of the twentieth century the "well established"[1] Seeley, Service was second only to Longman as Britain's oldest active publishing firm.
[verification needed][4] In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the firm published books in various fields, including travel and religion (particularly on Protestant Christianity).
In the final decades of the nineteenth century, Agnes Giberne's books of popular science were published by Seeley, Jackson, and Halliday and later by Seeley & Co., including Sun, Moon and Stars: Astronomy for Beginners (1879), which had sold 26,000 copies by 1903.
[9] In 1970, Seeley, Service merged with Leo Cooper Ltd., a firm that specialised in publishing "regimental histories, escape stories and war memoirs", to form Seeley, Service & Cooper,[1] which went into receivership in 1979 and was acquired by Frederick Warne.
A letter to the editor of Nature on 12 February 1920 argued: "Some thirty or more years ago a little jeu d'esprit was written by Dr. Edwin Abbott entitled Flatland.