Sir Samuel White Baker (8 June 1821 – 30 December 1893) was a British explorer, officer, naturalist, big game hunter, engineer, writer and abolitionist. He held the titles of Pasha and Major-General in the Ottoman Empire and Egypt. He served as the Governor-General of the Equatorial Nile Basin, which he established as the Province of Equatoria. He is mostly remembered as the discoverer of Lake Albert, an explorer of the Nile and interior of central Africa, and his exploits as a big game hunter in Asia, Africa, Europe and North America. Baker wrote a considerable number of books and published articles. He was a friend of King Edward VII who, as Prince of Wales, visited Baker with Queen Alexandra in Egypt.

In Vidin, a town in Bulgaria, Sir Baker and the Maharaja Duleep Singh attended a slave market where Baker fell in love with an enslaved girl on her way to the Ottoman Empire. After bribing her attendants, the two ran away and eventually became lovers, then married, she becoming Florence Baker. She followed her husband in his travels, fluent in English, Turk and Arabic. She rode camels, mules and horses and carried pistols when in the wild. She died on 11 March 1916, 23 years after her husband.

Macmillan Publishers was founded in 1843 by Daniel and Alexander Macmillan, two brothers from the Isle of Arran, Scotland. Daniel was the business while Alexander laid the literary foundations, publishing such authors as Charles Kingsley, Christina Rossetti, Matthew Arnold, Lewis Carroll, Alfred Tennyson, Thomas Hardy, and Rudyard Kipling. Macmillan established an office in New York City. It sold its American division in 1896, which published as the Macmillan Company. The company was one of the oldest independent publishing houses until 1995 when a 70% share of the company was bought by German media giant Georg von Holtzbrinck Publishing Group (Verlagsgruppe Georg von Holtzbrinck). Holtzbrinck purchased the remaining shares in 1999, ending the Macmillan family's ownership of the company.