Mount & Page

The firm of Mount and Page was founded at Tower Hill, London in 1701 by Richard Mount and Thomas Page, in premises near the docks that placed them squarely in the world of working mariners. Their landmark publication of The English Pilot in 1732 established their name as a global imprint of nautical authority. Over the following decades they systematically acquired the copper plates of defunct rival publishers — among them Greenvile Collins, Jeremiah Seller, Charles Price, and John and Samuel Thornton — effectively consolidating the British commercial chart trade under a single roof. By the mid-eighteenth century they were the dominant publisher of English navigational charts, a position they held until the firm, by then trading as Mount and Davidson, wound down in 1794, just one year before the founding of the Admiralty’s own Hydrographic Office rendered the commercial chart trade largely obsolete.