Oct. 16, 2002--British publisher John Murray VII will deliver the third annual Leslie A. Marchand Memorial Lecture at the University of Delaware on Friday, Oct. 25. His talk, free and open to the public, will begin at 4 p.m. in 127 Memorial Hall. The lecture, “Byron from the Sidelines.” will explore the various ways Murray has been “living with Byron” all of his life. A reception will follow in the Byron Lounge and Byron Room on the third floor of Memorial Hall.

Lord Byron

Murray is the seventh of this name to head the 234-year-old John Murray Publishers Ltd., in London. John Murray II (1778-1843) was the publisher of Lord Byron. Just recently the private company was taken over by Hodder Headline.

“The firm, a worldwide hallmark of quality books, said it could no longer hope to compete alone in an industry dominated by publishing conglomerates with bigger investment resources and more cash to buy authors. The decision means that the chairman, John Murray, will be the last of his dynasty. Earlier John Murrays were friends of authors including Byron, Jane Austen, Darwin, David Livingstone, Conan Doyle, John Betjeman and other eminent writers,” John Ezard wrote in May in The Guardian.

“The moment was 234 years in the making. But when John Murray Publishers Ltd., the oldest independent British publishing house, announced a few weeks ago that it was being taken over by Hodder Headline PLC, it was clear that market forces had finally caught up with a publisher that was once so remote from the idea of turning a quick profit that it burned the poet Lord Byron’s diaries to spare his family embarrassment,” Alan Cowell wrote in The International Herald Tribune in June.

After leaving Magdalen College, Oxford, Murray studied printing at Butler & Tanner and business management at Ashridge Management College. He then entered the family firm and after several years ran first the editorial department and then the marketing department. He succeeded his father (John Murray VI) as chairman in 1990 and is known for his extensive knowledge of all aspects of publishing and the book trade and his dedication to the company philosophy that authors always come first. He has edited and designed two small volumes: “A Gentleman Publisher’s Commonplace Book” and “Old Chestnuts Warmed Up,” an anthology of all the verse he has learned by heart.

His wife, Virginia Murray, who will accompany him at UD, worked for the art dealer Colnaghi and then for the antiquarian dealer Bertram Rota. After marrying Murray she became the company’s archivist. She helped John Murray VI with a major Byron exhibition held at the Victoria & Albert Museum in 1974 and has since assisted researchers from all over the world who journey to the company’s headquarters to work on the millions of dollars worth of manuscripts of Byron and all the other authors whose works have been published by the Murrays since the late 18th century.

The Byron Society of America’s Byron collection at UD consists of more than 2,000 volumes, 400 pamphlets and 66 objects ranging from figurines and busts to strands of hair, medallions and letters, including an unpublished letter from Byron’s mother. Part of the collection is displayed in glass-fronted bookcases in the third floor lounge of Memorial Hall, but the bulk is locked in the nearby Byron Room.

The late Leslie A. Marchand, co-founder of the Byron Society, was a Byron scholar at Rutgers University, the author of “Byron, A Biography” and editor of 12 volumes of “Byron’s Letters and Journals.” Previous Marchand lectures have been delivered by Jerome J. McGann, a distinguished professor of English from the University of Virginia, and Kay Redfield Jamison, professor of psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins University.