Hodder & Stoughton is a British publishing house, now an imprint of Hodder Headline.

The firm has its origins in the 1840s, with Matthew Hodder's employment, aged fourteen, with Messrs Jackson and Walford, the official publisher for the Congregational Union. In 1861 the firm became Jackson, Walford and Hodder; but in 1868 Jackson and Walford retired, and Thomas Wilberforce Stoughton joined the firm, creating Hodder & Stoughton.

Hodder & Stoughton published both religious and secular works, and its religious list contained some progressive titles. These included George Adam Smith's Isaiah. for its Expositor’s Bible series, which was one of the earliest texts to identify multiple authorship in the Book of Isaiah. There was also a sympathetic Life of St Francis by Paul Sabatier, a French Protestant pastor. Matthew Hodder made frequent visits to North America, meeting with the Moody Press and making links with Scribners and Fleming H. Revell. The Book of Isaiah (Hebrew: Sefer Yshayah ספר ישעיה) is one of the books of the Hebrew Bible and the Christian Old Testament, written by Isaiah[1]. // Content The first 39 chapters of Isaiah consist primarily of prophecies of the judgments awaiting nations that are persecuting Judah. ... Numerous saints have been named Francis. ... Charles Scribners Sons is a publisher that was founded in 1846 at the Brick Church Chapel on New Yorks Park Row. ...

The secular list only gradually accepted fiction, and it was still subject to "moral censorship" in the early part of the twentieth century. Matthew Hodder was doubtful about the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, and the company refused Michael Arlen's The Green Hat. In 1922 Hodder and Stoughton published an edition of Lewis Carrol's "Alice in Wonderland" which was likely very controversial at the time given the fantastical nature of the work. Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam (Persian: رباعیات عمر خیام) The Rubáiyát (Arabic: رباعیات) is a collection of poems (of which there are about a thousand) attributed to the Persian mathematician and astronomer Omar Khayyám (1048-1123). ... 1927 Time cover featuring Arlen Michael Arlen (November 16, 1895–June 23, 1956) was an Armenian essayist, novelist, playwright, and short story writer, who had his greatest successes in the 1920s while living and writing in England. ...

In 1928, the company became the exclusive British hardback publisher of Leslie Charteris's adventure novel series, The Saint, publishing all 50 UK first editions of the series until 1983. Leslie Charteris (May 12, 1907, Singapore–April 15, 1993) was born Leslie Charles Bowyer-Yin, to a Chinese father and an English mother. ... An artists conception of Simon Templar as seen on the cover of a 1983 omnibus edition collecting several early Saint books. ...

In the 1980s they acquired the rights to publish the English translations of the Asterix comics from the company Brockhampton Press Ltd. as "Hodder Dargaud". Hodder & Stoughton continued to publish them through the 1990s. They have since relinquished the rights to Orion Books. Beginning in 1988, the company took over first UK publishing rights for the James Bond book series from Jonathan Cape. The English language is a West Germanic language that originates in England. ... Asterix the Gaul Asterix (French: Astérix) is a fictional character, created in 1959 as the hero of a series of French comic books (with the same title) by René Goscinny (stories) and Albert Uderzo (illustrations). ... Comics (or, less commonly, sequential art) is a form of visual art consisting of images which are commonly combined with text, often in the form of speech balloons or image captions. ... The James Bond 007 gun logo James Bond 007, is a fictional British spy created by writer Ian Fleming in 1952. ... Jonathan Cape has been since 1987 an imprint of Random House. ...

In the 1970s Hodder & Stoughton was still known primarily as a Christian company. However, it is now merely a secular imprint of the larger Hodder Headline, alongside a number of imprints such as Delta, which produces erotic novels.

Reference

• John Attenborough, A Living Memory: Hodder and Stoughton 1868-1975, London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1975