George Washington Bacon was an American cartographer, bookseller, and publisher. He was born in Lockport, New York in 1830, the son of bookseller James Bacon. He relocated to London in 1861 and began working for an American atlas published, Joseph Colton. Bacon also started a variety of business ventures at this time, including importing maps, writing medical booklets, and selling various goods, such as portable gymnasia equipment and sewing machines. Later on, in 1875, he would acquire a patent for a ‘machine for washing and wringing clothes and textiles.’
He was elected a Fellow of The Royal Geographical Society in 1866 with the sponsorship of Edward Stanford and Alexander George Findlay. Unfortunately, most of his professional efforts were ultimately successful, and he declared bankruptcy in 1867. He then concentrated on his previous efforts in map publishing, starting his own company, Bacon & Co., and purchasing Edward Weller’s English County steel plates for reworking.
For the following decades, Bacon & Co. specialised in various formats of cartography, gaining recognition for their portable folding maps and their large-scale, late-Victorian atlases of the British Isles, London, and the world. After modifying and updating the Weller plates to publish a new atlas, Bacon published one of his most notable works in 1883, The New Ordnance Atlas of the British Isles. This atlas featured his improvements to the plates and prints, including clearer text and wider use of colour.
By 1871, he gained British citizenship after marrying Ruth Stanley and lived comfortably in Battersea with his family. Bacon & Co. had achieved a vast portfolio and added to this in 1893, when Bacon purchased the map business of James Wyld. This further added to his repertoire of London maps and business success, as Wyld was a renowned cartographer whose legacy included being official cartographer to Queen Victoria.
At the turn of the 20th century, well-established Scottish publishing firm W. & A. K. Johnston acquired Bacon & Co. and continued to publish maps under the Bacon & Co. brand up until the mid-1950s. George Bacon died in 1922.
