The Bookseller writes
Legal publisher and former master of The Stationers’ Company Neville Cusworth has died at the age 86. He passed away on 17th September 2025.
Born in Dusseldorf in 1938 to parents living and working in Germany at that time, Cusworth went on to spend several years separated from his parents due to the Second World War and the family’s inability to reunite in England. He attended St Paul’s School before going to Keble College, Oxford where he read Jurisprudence, graduating in 1961.
He initially worked at Penguin before moving to law publisher Butterworths (now part of RELX, formerly known as Reed Elsevier) in 1967, where he remained for 32 years, rising from legal editorial to become chief executive of global legal publishing operations. During his career, he published a significant number of high-profile UK authors and was “instrumental” in the global growth of the Butterworths group.
In the early 1980s, Cusworth grasped the significance of electronic database publishing and helped to put Butterworths at the forefront of new legal technology. In the mid 1990s, he was a senior member of the team that acquired Butterworths’ far-larger American partner for Reed Elsevier.
Cusworth’s interests ranged from architecture, art, theatre – especially opera and ballet – and history, particularly the local history of Cornwall, where he and his wife Sue moved in 1995. His “meticulously-researched” book Sheviock: History of a Cornish Coastal Manor and Parish (Phillimore) was published in 2009.
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