The firm of Boosey & Co. originated as a lending library which was founded by John Boosey. His family, which is of Franco-Flemish origin, came over from the Continent and settled in Essex in the early part of the fifteenth century. They were cloth spinners and were probably invited to this country to bring with them the latest cloth spinning methods from the Lowlands, since this was a major industry in East Anglia during the middle ages and competition with the Continent was always very fierce. The family, who continued to ply their trade for many generations, lived at Bocking, which is where John Boosey was born in 1740. It is not possible to give an exact date for his founding of the library. He was admitted to the freedom of the City of London in 1773 so the date would probably have been some time between 1765 and 1770. Another link with the past is to be found in the archives of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Correspondence with the family when they lived in King Street shows that they were on friendly terms, and the circulating library to which a stranger gave him a ticket, and to which he used to slip out from school, was not, as had been supposed, the Guildhall library (which was not reconstituted till 1824) but John Boosey's library.

“Fools will never realise how merit and luck are chained together”. These wise words of Goethe have never been proved more convincingly than by the development of Boosey & Hawkes in the last thirty years. When, after the second world war, Boosey & Hawkes emerged as one of the leading international publishers there was much talk of luck and fortuitous opportunity. No doubt luck and opportunity played a part in the destinies of the house but neither would have come its way if they had not been invited and indeed provoked by a consistent policy going back to the early years of this century. After the sudden death of Oliver Hawkes, Ralph Hawkes took charge of the publishing activities of Hawkes & Son as a very young man. While continuing the lucrative business of his father he was determined to find his way into serious music as well. I met him for the first time in 1923 when he came to Vienna and applied for the sole agency of Universal Edition and Wiener Philharmonischer Verlag, at that time the only competitor to Eulenburg's pocket scores. At about the same time he also acquired the sole agency of Editions Belaieff of Leipzig and of Edition Russe de Musique and Gutheil of Paris and Berlin, both owned by Serge and Natalie Koussevitzky. Thus Hawkes & Son became connected with a large and important section of the serious contemporary repertoire, including the major works of Stravinsky, Prokofiev, Rachmaninov, Rimsky-Korsakov, Glazunov, Mahler, Schoenberg, Alban Berg, Webern, Bartók, Kodály and many others. This was the very root of later developments, and the opportunities which were to arise had every reason to present themselves to Ralph Hawkes.