[1] For many decades the firm was Britain's largest book wholesaler[2] and a respected family-owned company,[3] but it was acquired by the media proprietor Robert Maxwell and went bankrupt in 1954, an event which, according to Lionel Leventhal, "sounded a warning to the book trade about Captain Robert Maxwell's way of doing business".
[4] In the years just before 1814 Benjamin Crosby and two assistants, William Simpkin (whose daughter married the publisher Henry George Bohn)[5] and Richard Marshall, ran a firm "supplying provincial firms with books and acting as an agent for their publications".
[2] In 1828 the firm changed its name to Simpkin, Marshall & Co. and in 1837 it was based at Stationers' Hall Court, London.
[2] As a book publisher Simpkin & Marshall was a generalist, with numerous fiction and nonfiction titles.
[8] According to Edward Pearce, Maxwell had used the "high reputation of the old-fashioned family company he had taken over... for purposes of predatory credit".