Books by Bloomsbury

Joseph Whitaker was born in 1820 the son of a silversmith, and began his career in books at an early age as an apprentice at Parker's, a scholarly bookshop in Oxford. During the 1850s, he was an editor at The Gentleman's Magazine in charge of the correspondence pages. This required him to answer a selection of reader's questions that were notoriously broad in their scope, and Whitaker consequently accumulated a substantial collection of invaluable newspaper cuttings, government statistics and questions and answers from a variety of sources. In addition to his work at The Gentleman's Magazine, he founded and edited The Bookseller, also finding time to marry twice and father 13 children. It was his growing number of financial dependants that prompted his decision to publish his collection of facts as an almanack.