Corporate body

Maclear & Co.

Thomas Maclean, bookseller and publisher was born August 12, 1818 in Northern Ireland. Thomas Maclear opened a bookstore in Toronto in the summer of 1848. He advertised as an agent of the Glasgow publishing firm Blackie and Son, and he may have worked for this company in Scotland and Canada before starting his own business. About November 1850 he began publishing William Henry Smith's Canada: past, present and future in a series of ten paper-covered parts. Two years later he launched another ambitious publication, the monthly Anglo-American Magazine, edited by Robert Jackson Macgeorge and illustrated with wood-engravings by John Allanson, Frederick C. Lowe, and other artists. In January 1854, in partnership with William Walter Copp and William Cameron Chewett, Maclear purchased the major part of the business of bookseller and publisher Hugh Scobie from his widow. The new firm, Maclear and Company, continued the Anglo-American Magazine (it ceased in 1855) and the distribution of Blackie and Son’s publications as well as the printing, publishing, and bookselling activities established by Scobie. The partners had purchased Scobie’s business for £6,500, £1,000 down and the balance to be paid over 11 years. The debt was endorsed by Chewett’s wealthy father, James Grant Chewett, who in return received security on the whole business and thus had a say in its operation. Maclear evidently did not relish the amount of power held by Chewett Sr and in 1857 he withdrew from the partnership and set up on his own as a wholesale bookseller and stationer. (Copp and Chewett would continue to use the name Maclear and Company until 1861.) Throughout most of the 1860s Maclear and Company appears in the Toronto directories as booksellers and stationers, but by the end of the decade Maclear had returned to publishing. He retired in 1887 and moved to Montreal, Quebec two years later. He died January 2, 1898.

http://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/maclear_thomas_12E.html