Watts & Co. (publishing firm)

[6] In the first ten years of its operation the firm competed with its main business rival, the secularist Charles Bradlaugh's Freethought Publishing Company, for market share.

To do that it published the works of William Stewart Ross (who penned essays using his nom de plume, "Saladin"), who was a strong critic of Bradlaugh on certain aspects of doctrine and social policy.

After publishing Joseph McCabe's The Religion of the Twentieth Century in 1899 to modest acclaim, the firm had its first major success in 1900 with Ernst Haeckel's The Riddle of the Universe which had sold 100,000 copies by 1905.

Each volume was sold for sixpence, a price shunned by mainstream publishers as inviting bankruptcy but which in fact ended up selling "in the region of 4,000,000 copies".

[13] Edited by: A.C. Grayling, Naomi Goulder, and Andrew Pyle Over the years C. A. Watts & Company Limited maintained a strong link with the Rationalist Press Association.