An Australian publishing company whose headquarters were based in Sydney, New South Wales, Angus & Robertson was founded by two Scots, David Mackenzie Angus and George Robertson, in January 1886 after Robertson bought a 50 per cent share in Angus' own 110 Market Street bookshop for £15. The partnership was initially concerned only with the bookselling business that Angus started eighteen months earlier in June 1884. The bookshop was stocked with ‘New and Second-hand Books … purchased in the home markets on very favourable terms' by a friend of Angus based in the United Kingdom, a Mr Young J. Pentland. Angus & Robertson's first entry into Australian publishing began in 1888 with a thin book of verse by H. Peden Steel titled A Crown of Wattle (71 pages). This was followed in the same year by Sun and Cloud on River and Sea (72 pages) by Ishmael Dare (a pen name for Arthur W. Jose who frequently wrote and edited for Angus & Robertson) and Facsimile of a Proposal for a Settlement on the Coast of New South Wales (3 pages) by Sir George Young (a work originally authored in 1785).

Angus & Robertson's modest experiments in local publishing continued into the 1890s. An expansion of its core bookselling business had required a move in 1890 to larger premises at 89 Castlereagh Street. A new ten-year partnership agreement was drafted and its starting capital was £2,331 7s 1d.