1. The modern Elsevier company was founded in 1880 by a scholarly book-lover, Jacobus Robbers. He named it after one of the most revered and ancient Dutch publishing houses and dynasties, Elzevir.

2. Elzevir was set up by Lowys Elzevir in 1580 in Leiden, just five years after William the Silent created the first Dutch university in that city. The company thrived until 1712, publishing as many as 3,000 titles, including the works of John Locke, Milton and Galileo.

3. The legacy of Holland’s first university press lived on into the nineteenth century, when “an Elzevir” came to be common parlance for either a small book or a collector’s edition of the classics. At this time an antiquarian book-collector also came to be called an “Elzevirian.”

4. Victor Hugo described Monsieur Mabeuf, one of his main characters in Les Miserables, as a man who “never succeeded in loving any woman as a much as a tulip bulb, nor any man so much as an Elzevir”.

5. In creating the modern Elsevier, Robbers borrowed not only a name of mythic proportions from Dutch culture. He also co-opted the Elzevir family’s old printers mark, used to this day as the company’s logo (see top left). The tree and the vine are said to represent the interdependent relationship between publishers and authors.

6. Until the late 1940s Elsevier was a small family concern with no more than ten employees. After WWII, as the language of science shifted from German to English, Elsevier’s then-unusual specialization in English-language international science journals propelled the company’s growth. Today Elsevier has 6,700 employees, who between them produce more than 1,800 journals and 2,200 new books each year.

7. Elsevier opened its first UK office in 1961 and a publishing, distribution and marketing centre in New York the following year. This created the foundations of the global scientific publishing company that Elsevier is today, operating 74 offices worldwide.

8. In the 1980s, media tycoon Robert Maxwell made an audacious, hostile takeover bid for Elsevier. Just years later, with his publishing empire crumbling about him, Maxwell offered to sell Elsevier Pergamon Press, the jewel in his crown, a prodigious and prestigious science publisher. A merger with the media conglomerate Reed the following year and the purchase of the renowned medical journal The Lancet, established Elsevier’s reputation as the world’s premier scientific, technical and medical publisher.

9. In 1997, Elsevier launched ScienceDirect, a full-text database of the company’s entire journal collection. This has revolutionised the way information is accessed, retrieved and shared among the global scientific community, both academic and corporate. Elsevier’s entire back catalogue has been digitised, including all editions of The Lancet dating back to 1823. Elsevier has invested $400m in ScienceDirect to date. It carries 6m articles and 80m abstracts. The platform generated 240m downloads in 2004 alone.

10. Today Elsevier is much more than just a world-leading science publisher and services provider. In 2002 it acquired the publishing companies, Mosby, Saunders, and Churchill-Livingstone, making it also the leading provider of information for doctors, nurses and other health-care specialists worldwide.