Higginbothams

Higginbothams is a bookshop at No. 116 Anna Salai, the road once called Mount Road, in Chennai. It describes itself as trading since 1844. Abel Joshua Higginbotham reached Madras by ship in the mid-1800s, by his company's account without ticket or papers. He found work as a librarian at the Wesleyan Book Depository. When the mission closed the shop in 1844 he bought the stock and moved the books to Mount Road under his own name. Copies of Queen Victoria's 1858 proclamation were distributed from the store. Sir Charles Trevelyan, Governor of Madras, praised its shelves of philosophy and classical literature. The firm supplied European books to Prince Edward VII on his visits and earned a place in John Murray's Handbook of the Madras Presidency. Higginbotham served as Sheriff of Madras and died in 1891. His son Charles Herbert Higginbotham took the firm onward, opening in Bangalore in an 1897 Palladian building on South Parade and setting up bookstalls at railway stations across the south. The house published Culinary Jottings for Madras in 1884 by Colonel Arthur Robert Kenney-Herbert, who wrote as Wyvern. It was awarded Royal Booksellers in 1875. Higginbothams has been part of the Amalgamations Group since the 1940s, with branches at Chennai Egmore and Chennai Central stations and the airport. Scroll.in told the founder's story at length in 2018.