Collectible Book Publishers

A. D. Worthington & Co. was a book publisher in the 1800s from Hartford, Connecticut. Their books tend to be focused on biographies and histories. Some of their best-known works include Our Famous Women: An Authorized Record of the Lives and Deeds of Distinguished American Women of Our Times (1884), My Story of the War-A Woman’s Narrative by Mary A. Livermore, Thirty years…

Albert L. Burt’s first venture into the publishing world was his sale of a small edition of the National Standard Dictionary while working as a travelling salesman. Using a tactic heavily dependent on the power of suggestion, Burt was able to essentially sell the dictionary as a companion book to various manuals and reference books, and was extremely successful in doing so. In 1889,…

Alfred Smith Barnes learned the publishing trade while working for D. F. Robinson & Co., a publisher in Hartford, Connecticut. During this time, Barnes successfully published books aimed at the educational market including mathematic texts by Charles Davies and historical texts by Emma Willard, a joint venture between the three. In 1840, Barnes moved to Philadelphia, where he began building his own publishing company,…

Ace Books, oldest continuously operating science fiction publisher in the United States, originally got its start as a genre publisher of mysteries and westerns. The first book published by Ace, which was founded by Aaron A. Wyn in 1952, was a pair of mysteries bound tête-bêche: Keith Vining’s Too Hot for Hell, backed with Samuel W. Taylor’s The Grinning Gismo, priced at 35…

Poet, teacher, and printer Gary Metras founded Adastra Press in 1979 in Easthampton, Massachusetts. Metras’ small-scale operation prints and publishes short collections of quality contemporary poetry using the methods and equipment of the antique book arts, letterpress printing, and hand-sewn bindings. Most recently, Adastra Press was publishing 2-5 titles per year, each one of them a work of art all its own.

Adastra has printed…

Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. was founded in 1915 and incorporated in 1918 with Alfred Knopf as president; his wife, Blanche Knopf, as vice president; and his father, Samuel Knopf, as treasurer. Alfred and Blanche traveled abroad regularly and became known for publishing European, Asian, and Latin American writers in addition to American writers. In 1923, Knopf also started publishing periodicals, beginning with The American…

Andrew Hoyem, founder of Arion Press, owes much of his knowledge, experience, and resulting success in the printing industry to Robert Grabhorn, the surviving half of the Grabhorn Press. The two partnered in 1966 and Hoyem, having no formal training in the craft, began to acquire a solid understanding of the process and the business. Grabhorn-Hoyem specialized in typographical design, fine printing, and the…

Arkham House was founded by writers August Derleth and Donald Wandrei in 1939 with the publication of its first book, Howard Phillips Lovecraft’s The Outsider and Others. Lovecraft’s horror fiction became iconic to the publishing house, the name “Arkham House” deriving from the author’s widely-used fictional New England city. In 1944, after Arkham House had sold out of the first four books it published,…

Husband and wife Prosper and Martine Assouline published their first book, La Colombe d’Or (1993), on the history of their favorite hotel in the South of France. Prosper took the photographers and Martine drafted the text. The publication launched Assouline Publishing and established the company as a unique force in the world of luxury book publishing. Assouline’s 1,000+ titles focus on images rather than…

In 1959, Alfred A. Knopf, Jr. left his family publishing house to found Atheneum Books with Simon Michael Bessie of Harpers and Hiram Haydn of Random House. Two years later, Knopf recruited Jean E. Karl to become the director of children’s books. Atheneum merged with Charles Scribner’s Sons to become The Scribner Book Company in 1978. In 1984, Scribner, which by then included a…

Founded in 1917 in Boston, The Atlantic Monthly Press started as a book publishing imprint of the Atlantic Monthly magazine. In 1925, Little, Brown entered into an agreement to publish all Atlantic Monthly books. This arrangement lasted until 1985 when new ownership established Atlantic Monthly Press as a fully independent publishing house, effectively separating the press from the magazine. In 1993, the Atlantic Monthly…

Avalon Books got its start in 1950 as a New York-based niche publisher specializing in selling hardcover genre fiction to the library market. Through the 1950s and 60s, Avalon became an important science fiction imprint, though later the company shifted towards romances, mysteries, and Westerns. In its prime, Avalon published 60 books a year: new titles, reissued out-of-print titles originally from other publishers, and…

B. W. Huebsch, the son of a rabbi who immigrated to the United States from Germany, was a daring publisher based in New York City. He is responsible for the first American editions of D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers, Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, and, perhaps most notably, the first printing of James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young…

After establishing Penguin USA (1939) and Bantam Books (1945), Ian and Betty Ballantine founded Ballantine Books in 1952. At the time, paperback books had gained popularity as a result of World War II, in which they were distributed to military personnel in all theatres of war. The Ballantines took this opportunity to concentrate on paperback originals — books first published in paperback rather than…

Founded in 1854 by the American Unitarian Association, Beacon Press is non-profit publisher of serious fiction, non-fiction, and poetry. The Press is responsible for many ground-breaking classics, including James Baldwin’s Notes of a Native Son, Herbert Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man, Jean Baker Miller’s Toward a New Psychology of Women, and Mary Daly’s Gyn/Ecology.

In 1971, Beacon printed the Senator Gravel Edition…

One cannot discuss Black Sparrow Press without mentioning Charles Bukowski. In 1965, founder John Martin was managing an office supply company in Southern California when he stumbled upon the writing of Bukowski — a then 46-year-old post office employee. Martin was so struck by Bukowski’s work that he offered him $100, one-fifth of Martin’s own monthly salary, to quit his job and write…

After gaining industry experience with Macmillan and then Sidgwick & Jackson, Nigel Newton founded Bloomsbury Publishing in 1986. The company was originally established as a publisher of high quality fiction, but has since expanded with four divisions: Bloomsbury Academic and Professional, Bloomsbury Information, Bloomsbury Adult Publishing and Bloomsbury Children’s Publishing. Bloomsbury now has offices in London, New York, Sydney, and New Delhi.

This relatively new…

In 1850, Samuel Merrill bought an Indianapolis bookstore and entered the publishing business, intially focusing on law books. After Merrill’s death five years later, his son Samuel Merrill, Jr. continued the business. Merrill Jr. guided the company through a series of business partners and name changes, including Merrill Meigs and Company, and the Bowen-Merrill Company. In 1903, the name became the Bobbs-Merrill Company, after…

The Bodley Head was originally established in 1887 as a partnership between John Lane and Elkin Mathews to trade in antiquarian books in London. In 1894, Lane and Mathews began to publish works of “stylish decadence,” including the notorious literary periodical The Yellow Book. The Bodley Head became a private company in 1921. Around this time, Allen Lane, John Lane’s nephew who had inherited…

Bottom Dog Press is a non-profit and independent literary publisher, originally based in Huron, Ohio. The organization has published over 185 books and received support from the Ohio Arts Council for many of these early projects. Some of its first publications include Larry Smith’s Across These States: Journal Poems (1984), Terry Hermsen’s Thirty-Six Spokes: The Bicycle Poems (1985) and a dual chapbook consisting of…

Austrian-born August Brentano originally founded Brentano’s, an independent New York City bookstore, in 1853 when he established a newsstand in front of a hotel. At that time, newspapers and magazines were usually peddled from door to door, but the hotelkeeper allowed Brentano to use the desirable space, some say because Brentano had an evident physical handicap. Regardless of that fact, thanks to his resourcefulness,…

Founded in 1843, Batsford, now an imprint of Pavilion Books, is a leading publisher in the areas of fashion and design, embroidery and textiles, chess, British heritage, and architecture. Batsford’s definitive books for the serious enthusiast and professional include the works of Lewis F. Day, Sir Fletcher Banister, Cecil Beaton, John Betjemen and Constance Howard.

British painter and designer Brian Cook was the…

When John Calder began publishing under his own name in 1949, he focused on translated classics, such as the works of Anton Chekhov, Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and Emile Zola. But within a few years, Calder began publishing a group of new writers who would change the face of twentieth-century literature. This group included Samuel Beckett, all of whose…

In 1848, John Cassell published a weekly newspaper called The Standard of Freedom. Three years later, he rented part of La Belle Sauvage, a London Inn which had been a playhouse in Elizabethan times, and had it built out for printing magazines and books. The years that followed were the period of Cassell’s greatest prosperity, but by 1855, Cassell was forced to declare bankruptcy.…

After less than successful attempts in the banking industry and magazine publishing, Albert E. Gipson founded Caxton Printers in 1907. The commercial printing company was named after William Caxton, who printed the first-ever book in English in 1474, and since its inception, the Caxton’s publications display the original “W.C.” insignia on their colophons and spines. Originally, Caxton offered printing and office services to the…

Originally a publisher of religious books, Charles Scribner founded the company in 1846. By 1870, Scribner organized a new firm, Scribner and Company, and began publishing Scribner’s Monthly, an illustrated magazine, in addition to books. Following Charles Scribner’s death in 1871, his son John Blair Scribner took over as president of the company. His other sons, Charles Scribner II and Arthur Hawley Scribner, would…

What is now the largest English-language book publishing and distribution company in Asia, Tuttle Publishing (originally the Charles E. Tuttle Company) was founded in Tokyo in 1948. Coming from a Vermont family long associated with publishing, Tuttle, a Harvard graduate, travelled to Japan in a military role at the end of World War II and established a publishing company with the mission of publishing…

City Lights, which pays homage to the Charlie Chaplin film of the same name, is an independent bookstore-publisher combination in San Francisco that specializes in world literature, the arts, and progressive politics. City Lights Books was founded by poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Peter D. Martin (who left two years later). Martin first used City Lights in 1952 as the title of a magazine,…

The Glasgow-based Collins was founded in 1819 when William Collins partnered with Charles Chalmers to establish a printing and publishing business. However, the partnership was short-lived and Chalmers left the business in the mid 1820s. The company eventually found success in publishing religious and educational books, including bibles, atlases, and dictionaries with the help of Collins’ son, William Collins (II). The founder Collins died…

A medium-sized publishing house founded in 1927, Coward-McCann was joined with the firm G.P. Putnam’s in 1936 to publish titles such as playwright Thornton Wilder’s Our Town. In 1959, John Geoghegan joined Coward-McCann as editor-in-chief. Two years later, he was named president, then chairman. In 1971, the company was renamed Coward, McCann & Geoghegan.

Daniel Appleton, owner of a Massachusetts general store, opened a book department in 1813 with the help of his son, William Henry Appleton. In 1931, Daniel published the first book, William Mason’s Crumbs from the Master’s Table. By 1847, after issuing many travel guides, including the best selling European Guide Book, William Henry considered the store a sideline and was concentrating on publishing. With…

Avatar Adi Da Samraj (born Franklin Albert Jones), founder of a new religious movement known as Adidam, taught of a philosophy similar to many eastern religions, naming spiritual enlightenment as the ultimate priority of human life. During the spiritual counterculture of the 1970s, Adi Da wrote many books about his spiritual philosophy and related matters. He created Dawn Horse Press to publish his books…

Delacorte Press began as a book imprint of Dell Publishing, which was founded in 1921 by George T. Delacorte, Jr. Dell initially published magazines and comics, but began publishing books through Delacorte Press in the 1940s. The imprint became known for its placement of maps on the back cover of its books, which were meant to aid the reader by showing the location of…

Dodd, Mead and Company was first established in New York City as the firm Taylor and Dodd. The founders of the company, Moses Woodruff Dodd and John S. Taylor, originally set out to publish religious books, with their first title published being Obligations of the World to the Bible, A Series of Lectures to Young Men (1839). In 1840, Dodd bought Taylor out…

At the age of 15, Frank Nelson Doubleday quit school to work for the publishing company Charles Scribner’s Sons, and he became manager of Scribner’s Magazine when it was begun in 1886. In 1897, Doubleday, in partnership with magazine publisher Samuel McClure, founded Doubleday & McClure Co.

Their partnership only lasted three years; in 1900, the company became Doubleday, Page & Co. when Walter Hines…

In 1852, Edward Payson Dutton, along with Lemuel Ide, founded a bookselling firm in Boston. After he bought Ide out of the firm, Dutton acquired Ticknor & Fields bookstore along with its publishing division in 1864. Dutton then expanded both the retail and publishing divisions of his company by opening a store in New York City and relocating its headquarters there. At this…

Based in Norwalk, Connecticut, Easton Press is a publisher specializing in high-quality leather-bound, (mostly) reprint editions of classics, poetry and art books, popular literature, and science fiction. Easton’s list of series include: Signed First Editions, Signed First Editions of Science Fiction, Signed Modern Classics, Masterpieces of Science Fiction, Library of the Presidents, 100 Greatest Books Ever Written, Great Books of the 20th Century,…

Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc. was founded in 1923 when the author became one of the first to incorporate himself. Initially a tax incentive, the incorporation gave Burroughs more control over his works and ensured the distribution shares among his family. Burroughs’ books were published through his company from 1931 to 1948, with one additional title in 1967. The Burroughs family continues to own and…

In 1880, Liberal politician Sir John Benn founded publishing firm Benn Brothers with the first edition of The Cabinet Maker, an illustrated monthly journal dealing with the artistic and technical aspects of furniture. Though it was slow to start, The Cabinet Maker was eventually established as the main journal for the furniture trade in Britain. After Sir John was elected to Parliament in 1892,…

Though it didn’t become a firm until 1929, Faber & Faber can trace its roots back to The Scientific Press, founded in the early twentieth century. Sir Maurice and Lady Gwyer, the owners of The Scientific Press, wanted to expand into trade publishing with the help of Geoffrey Faber, which led to the establishment of Faber and Gwyer in 1925. Four years later, the…

Around 1946, Lloyd Arthur Eshbach, who eventually founded Fantasy Press, ordered a copy of Skylark of Space from its publisher, the Buffalo Book Company. Eshbach was soon frustrated by Buffalo’s delays in publishing and lack of marketing, an area in which Eshbach had gained expertise from his job as a copywriter for Glidden. He wrote to Tom Hadley of the Buffalo Book Company to…

Farrar, Straus and Giroux was originally established by Roger W. Straus and John C. Farrar in 1946. The young firm’s hodgepodge backlist included an interior-decorating how-to called Inside Your Home; Francis, the Talking Mule; and Carlo Levi’s Christ Stopped at Eboli (1947), a bestselling critical success and harbinger of things to come. Other commercial triumphs include: Look Younger, Live Longer by the…

First Editions Library is a series of exact facsimile replicas of the first editions published by Collectors’ Reprint Inc. Founded in 1987 by Henry Reath, a former president and publisher of Doubleday; his wife, Mary; and Kemp Battle, who also worked at Doubleday, the company prided itself on publishing the best of American literature as it first appeared.

FEL facsimiles have the same weight, size,…

When Charles Ede, Christopher Sandford (of Golden Cockerel Press), and Alan Bott (founder of Pan Books) founded Folio Society in 1947, the goal of the firm was to produce “editions of the world’s great literature, in a format worthy of the contents, at a price within the reach of everyman.” Folio Society has been publishing beautifully crafted hardback editions of classic literature, both…

Four Walls Eight Windows is a New York City-based independent book publisher of both fiction and non-fiction. Known as Four Walls or 4W8W, the company was established in fall of 1987 by two young editors, John G. H. Oakes and Daniel Simon, who previously had an imprint under the same name at Writers and Readers Publishing.

Four Walls is noted for its dual commitment…

Franklin Library, the distribution arm of the Franklin Press, began publishing in 1973 and closed permanently in 2000. Franklin books were designed and bound by the Sloves Organization, an affiliate of the Franklin Mint, and one of the few binderies that focused solely on leather book binding. Franklin published in three styles: full genuine leather, imitation leather, and quarter-bound genuine leather. Full leather-bound editions…

The publishing house Franklin Watts Inc. was formed in 1942 and sold to Grolier in 1957. Franklin Watts,…

Fulcrum Press was a major avant garde poetry press started in 1965 by Stuart Montgomery, a Rhodesian-born doctor and poet. The Press launched with the publication of Basil Bunting’s Loquitur (1965) and later published his First Book of Odes (1965), Ode II/2 (1965), Briggflatts: An Autobiography (1966), and Collected Poems (1968).

During its time, Fulcrum Press published about 40 books by more than 20…

Funk & Wagnalls was originally established as I.K. Funk & Company in 1876. A publisher of religiously oriented works, the company’s first title was Metropolitan Pulpit (later renamed Homiletic Review). In 1877, founder Isaac Kaufmann Funk was joined by one of his college classmates, Adam Willis Wagnalls, as a partner. The two changed the name of the firm to Funk & Wagnalls Company in…

The company was established in 1857 by George W. Carleton and Edward P. Rudd. After the death of Rudd in 1861, Carleton carried on the business alone under his own name until 1871 when he partnered with George W. Dillingham and changed the company named to G.W. Carleton & Co. When Carleton retired in 1886, Dillingham became head of the firm until his death…

Gambit, Inc. is a publishing company dedicated to quality chess books for players of all levels. Three editors/chess players — John Nunn, Graham Burgess, and Murray Chandler — founded the London-based publisher in early 1997. Nunn and Burgess met while working for general publisher B.T. Batsford, which first introduced its own chess list in the late 1960s and had been considered the world’s leading…

Established in 1908 in Toronto, George H. Doran moved the book publishing company to New York shortly thereafter. The firm prospered, publishing many genres, from major literary works to “working class” novels and “how to” books. Among the notable authors published by the company were Arthur Conan Doyle, O. Henry, and Virginia Woolf. George H. Doran Co. merged with Doubleday, Page & Co. in…

Martin L. Greenberg wanted to make science fiction and fantasy part of the modern world of publishing, a dream that would come to true — with unintended consequences. Greenberg created Gnome Press along with David Kyle in 1948. Initially, Greenberg was in charge of the business and editorial ends of the company while Kyle handled Gnome’s production and artwork, including the design of the…

British writer Franklin Thomas Grant Richards founded his own publishing house in January 1897. Under the imprint of Grant Richards, his publications that year included the Paris and Florence volumes of Grant Allen’s Historical Guides series as well as Allen’s The Evolution of the Idea of God: An Inquiry into the Origins of Religion. The next year, he published works by two…

Sisters Gwendoline and Margaret Davies established Gregynog Press, named after their home, Gregynog Hall, in rural Mid-Wales in 1922. Early on, the press gained a reputation for producing high-quality limited edition books, primarily on a Victoria platen press, and quickly became one of the leading private presses of its day. Gregynog was unique in that all components of its books were created under one…

Established in January 1884, the New York City-based Grolier Club is the oldest existing bibliophilic society in North America. Printing press manufacturer and book collector Robert Hoe founded the club along with eight others, all of whom were involved in the editing, design, production, sale and/or acquisition of fine books. The original mission of Grolier Club was “to foster the study, collecting, and appreciation…

Alexander Grosset and George T. Dunlap met when both worked for American Publishers Corporation. After that firm went bankrupt in 1898, Grosset & Dunlap formed a partnership and essentially changed the focus of the publishing industry from expensive books for the few to cheaper books for the masses. Sidestepping royalties and other fees, Grosset & Dunlap got their start reprinting books that were already…

Henry Pordes has been a famous name in the book trade industry for more than 50 years. A bookseller, wholesaler, and publisher of learned periodicals, academic titles, and Jewish books, the family business opened in 1983 at Charing Cross Road in London, a location renowned for its second-hand bookshops. Henry Pordes Books Ltd. specializes in antiquarian books as well as books on art, literature,…

In 1848, Robert Porter and Charles Davis founded Davis & Porter Company, a Philadelphia firm specializing in the printing of trade and art books. When Henry Coates joined the firm in 1867, it was renamed Davis, Porter & Coates. Davis retired in 1867 and the firm was renamed Porter & Coates. In 1869, G. Morrison Coates, brother of Henry Coates, joined the firm.…

An imprint of George Macy Companies, Ltd., Heritage Press was founded in 1935. The Press printed more affordable classic volumes that were previously published by Macy’s Limited Editions Club and covered a broad range of topics primarily within the Western canon. In addition to Macy, directors of the Heritage Press included Cedric Crowell, General Manager of the Doubleday Bookshops; Frank L. Magel, head…

Named after their house in Richmond, London, Leonard and Virginia Woolf founded Hogarth Press in July 1917. After purchasing a hand press and teaching themselves to use it, the Woolfs published their first text: Two Stories, a pamphlet containing Three Jews by Leonard and The Mark on the Wall by Virginia with woodcuts by Dora Carrington. The pamphlet was sold by subscription…

In 1924, A.A. Heller and Alexander Trachtenberg founded International Publishers, the New York City-based publishing house for books associated with the Workers Party of America — the direct antecedent of the Communist Party USA.

During the 1920s, International Publishers produced the first English-language editions of important works on Marxist theory, including the following: Foundations of Christianity (1925), Are the Jews…

Poet Jonathan Williams, along with painter David Ruff, initially founded Jargon Society in a San Francisco Chinese restaurant in 1951. The first publication of the independent press (Jargon 1) was a folded pamphlet with a poem by Williams, titled Garbage Litters the Iron Face of the Sun’s Child, accompanied by an etching by Ruff. Only 150 copies were produced. The second publication (Jargon 2)…

Named after an Elizabethan printer, John Day Co. was founded by Richard J. Walsh in 1926. The New York firm specialized in illustrated fiction, publishing the likes of Irving and Peggy Adler, as well as current affairs books and pamphlets, working with organizations such as National Geographic Magazine, The New Republic, and the Theatre Guild. In 1974, John Day Co. was sold to Thomas…

English publisher John Newbery, the “Father of Children’s Literature,” was one of the first to make children’s literature a sustainable and profitable part of the literary market. Newbery’s success was due in part to the rise of the British middle class, which resulted in increased amounts of money and leisure time able to be spent on children. Additionally, philosophies regarding the role and…

Lakeside Classics is a series printed annually at Christmas-time by commercial printer RR Donnelley. The tradition began in 1903 by Thomas E. Donnelley, son of the founder and president of the company at the time. While the basic book format has remained essentially the same since inception — hardcover, cloth wrapped and gold embossed, the cover material and type style are adjusted every 25…

Little, Brown and Company was founded in 1837 by Charles Little and James Brown. The company initially specialized in legal treatises, publishing the works of Benjamin Franklin and George Washington, but was soon introducing American buyers to imports such as the Encyclopedia Britannica. James Brown’s son, John Murray Brown, took over the company in 1884 and by the 1890s, he had expanded the company…

Longman, the world’s oldest commercial imprint, was originally founded in London by Thomas Longman in 1724. Longman himself was one of the six booksellers who undertook the responsibility of Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary (1746-55). With Longman’s death in 1755, his nephew, Thomas Longman, became the sole proprietor of the company and greatly extended its colonial trade. Longman published the works of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey, and…

Secker & Warburg was formed in 1936 by the merger of the firms of Martin Secker and Frederic Warburg. The British publishing company became renowned for its anti-fascist and anti-communist political stance, a position that opposed the ethos of many intellectuals of the time.

After George Orwell parted company with Communist Party sympathizer Victor Gollancz over his editing of The Road to Wigan Pier,…

Though it was originally set up for “tax purposes,” Merit Publishers succeeded Pioneer Publishers as the publishing arm of the Socialist Workers Party in 1965. Like Pioneer before and Pathfinder Press after, Merit published of works of Marxist theory and of socialist political analysis and commentary. The houses have also been the principal English-language publishers of writings of Leon Trotsky as well…

As a side project to his teaching, Sir Algernon Methuen began to publish and market his own textbooks under the name Methuen & Co. in 1889. Three years later, the publisher had its first substantial success: Rudyard Kipling’s Barrack-Room Ballads (1892). Methuen soon experienced rapid growth, publishing Oscar Wilde’s De Profundis (1905) as well as the works of Marie Corelli,

Metropolitan Books was established in 1995 with the hope of highlighting unconventional, uncompromising, and sometimes controversial voices. One of five imprints under Henry Holt, one of the oldest publishers in the United States, Metropolitan Books publishes novels, graphic novels, memoirs, and short stories by provocative and original American and international authors on a variety of topics, including politics, history, social science, and cultural criticism.…

Michael Joseph founded his publishing house as a subsidiary of Victor Gollancz in 1935, a time when many other publishing houses were folding or suffering serious financial difficulties. Joseph and Gollancz soon began to clash on various topics — from publishing material to financial targets. After Gollancz tried to censor Sir Philip Gibbs’s Across the Frontiers for political reasons, Joseph bought out him…

Founded in 1917 by Albert Boni and Horace Liveright, Modern Library pioneered the idea of providing American readers with inexpensive reprints of European modernist titles, plus the work of a few contemporary Americans. Because of this, it is considered one of the most important publishing houses of the early 1920s. However, by 1925, after buying out his partner a few years early, Liveright sold…

Founded in 1975 by Otto Penzler, Mysterious Press is an imprint devoted to printing the best mystery, crime and suspense books, using fine paper and top dust jacket artists. It was the first publishing company to issue mystery fiction in limited, signed, slipcased editions. Among its first authors were Ross Macdonald, Isaac Asimov, Cornell Woolrich, and Robert Bloch.

After seven years of…

Naval Institute Press was founded in 1898 with the publication of basic guides to naval practices. One of the world’s largest and most respected publishers of naval and military books, the press has since broadened its scope to include books of more general interest and publishes about 80 books a year. Perhaps best known for Stephen Coonts’ The Bluejackets’ Manual and Tom Clancy?s…

The first American publisher of such notables as Vladimir Nabokov, Jorge Luis Borges, and Henry Miller, New Directions was founded in 1936 when twenty-two-year-old James Laughlin issued the first of the New Directions anthologies. In response to Ezra Pound’s advice to the Harvard sophomore to “do something useful,” Laughlin created an independent press committed to publishing experimental writing. The (roughly)…

German-American artist Anton Schutz, noted for his architectural etchings of New York City that celebrate the grandeur of the modern city, originally founded New York Graphic Society, Inc. in 1925 to supplement his etching career as the economic depression damaged the fine art market. What began as an outlet for marketing original art during hard times, NYGS became the world’s largest publisher of color…

In 1922, Francis Meynell founded Nonesuch Press, along with his second wife Vera Mendel, and their mutual friend David Garnett, co-owner of Birrell & Garnett’s bookshop in Soho’s Gerrard Street. The first book published by the London-based private press was a volume of John Donne’s Love Poems was issued in May 1923.

In attempts to produce book designs with the quality of a fine-press…

Paris-based Olympia Press was launched in 1953 by Maurice Girodias as a rebranded version of the Obelisk Press. Publishing erotic fiction and avant-garde literary fiction, Olympia specialized in books that could not legally be published in the English-speaking world. It is thought that Girodias correctly assumed that the French, who were either unable to read to books or simply more sexually tolerant, would not…

Origin Press was an American poetry magazine founded by Cid Corman in 1951. The magazine provided an early platform for the work of ground-breaking poets and was devoted, primarily, to one writer in each issue. Origin Press shifted locations with the editor’s own moves, beginning in Ashland, Massachusetts, moving to Kyoto, Japan, back to Boston, and returning to Japan again as Corman resettled.…

Oxmoor House is the book publishing division of Southern Progress Corporation based in Birmingham, Alabama. The company was founded in 1979 with the first publication of Southern Living’s Southern Living Annual Recipes. Today, Oxmoor House publishes “books to enrich your life,” focusing on topics like cooking and entertaining, crafts and hobbies, diet and health, gardening, house and home, and self-improvement for brands such as…

Paladin Press came into existence in September 1970 when Peder Lund joined Robert K. Brown as a partner in a book-publishing venture previously known as Panther Publications. Both Lund and Brown were convinced there was a market for books on specialized military and action/adventure topics. Paladin’s first book, 150 Questions for a Guerrilla, was by Gen. Alberto Bayo, a Communist veteran of…

One of the first to publish and promote Franz Kafka and Franz Werfel, Kurt Wolff founded his first publishing company, Kurt Wolff Verlag, in Germany in 1913. However, the deteriorating German economic conditions soon forced Wolff to close Kurt Wolff Verlag. Wolff moved to France and then Italy, where he became publisher of Pantheon Casa Editrice, which he had co-founded in 1924. After he…

Pascal “Pat” Covici was born in Romania, but spent the later years of his childhood in Chicago. After attending both the University of Michigan and the University of Chicago, Covici’s first publishing venture began when he partnered with William “Billy” McGee in 1922. The two established a publishing company and bookstore in Chicago, which became a popular spot for writers. Covici-McGee’s first title published…

Pathfinder Press was established in New York City in 1969 as a successor to Pioneer Publishers and Merit Publishers, and has been associated with the Socialist Workers Party (SWP). As the publishing arm of the SWP, Pathfinder and its predecessors have been publishers of works of Marxist theory and of socialist political analysis and commentary. They have also been the principal English-language…

Charles C. Shoemaker founded Penn Publishing Company in 1889. After the success of its elocution and recitation publications, Penn began to publish plays for amateurs and entertainment and education handbooks. In the early 1900s, Penn found its niche with the publication of boys’ and girls’ series books. By 1927, juvenile books accounted for seventy-five percent of Penn’s publications, while it continued to maintain several…

With over 1,500 titles in print, Phaidon Press is one of the leading international art book publishers. But that wasn’t the original goal. When Dr. Bela Horovitz and Ludwig Goldscheider founded the press in Vienna in 1923, they wanted to publish literature, philosophy, and history. One of its first books published was a German edition of Plato’s works. Horovitz and Goldscheider were so passionate…

Philosophical Library is a small publishing house based in New York City specializing in psychology, philosophy, religion, and history. It has been a consistent and reliable source for serious readers, libraries, academic institutions, and booksellers worldwide. Founded in 1941 by Romanian-born philosopher and scholar Dagobert D. Runes, the original aim of Philosophical Library was to publish the works of European intellectuals Runes admired and…

Picador is an imprint of Pan Macmillan in the United Kingdom and Australia and of Macmillan Publishing in the United States. (Georg von Holtzbrinck Publishing Group owns both companies.) The imprint was launched in the UK in October 1972 with the aim of publishing outstanding international writing in paperback. Picador’s first eight titles include: Rosshalde by Hermann Hesse, A Personal Anthology by Jorge…

Pineapple Press is a prime example of an independent niche publisher. Since 1982, founders David and June Cussen have been publishing trade books, specializing in Florida and the Southeast, out of their home in Sarasota, FL. Many of Pineapple Press’ titles are geared towards educating and entertaining a variety of visitors — from Baseball in Florida for the MLB spring-training fanatics to a reference…

Pioneer Publishers was the original Trotskyist publishing house in the US, based out of New York City. Pioneer was established in 1930 founded by Max Shachtman in affiliation with the Communist League of America (predecessor of the Socialist Workers Party). As it became the official publishing arm of the SWP, Pioneer primarily published of works of Marxist theory and of socialist political analysis and…

Though it was first founded in 1931, Moscow-based Progress Publishers of the Soviet Union gained notoriety after it took over the role of the Foreign Languages Publishing House ? the state-run publisher of Russian literature, novels, propaganda, and books about the USSR in foreign languages ? in 1963. In this, Progress became known for “Short History of USSR,” the ABC series (ABC of…

R.R. Bowker LLC, provider of bibliographic information on published works to the book trade, including publishers, booksellers, libraries, and individuals, was originally founded by Frederick Leypoldt, a German immigrant. Leypoldt worked as a bookseller and recognized the need for good bibliographic information to make the book business more efficient. In 1868, he published his first periodical: the monthly Literary Bulletin. Over the next decade,…

In 1967, Steve and Connirae Andreas founded Real People Press in Lafayette, California, with the goal making cutting edge books in the realm of personal change and growth available to the general public. Gestalt therapy was another original area of focus for the press. Some of the first titles published by Real People Press include: From Person to Person (1967) by Carl Rogers and…

Also known as Riverside Publishing Company and Riverside Book Co.

Henry Oscar Houghton, a one-time mayor and long-time resident of Cambridge, Massachusetts, founded Riverside Press in an old building along the banks of the Charles River in 1852. Soon after its establishment, the printing plant attracted several significant publishing firms and established publishing contracts with Atlantic Monthly and G. & C. Merriam Company, among others.…

Founded in 1927 by entrepreneur Angelo Rizzoli as A. Rizzoli & Co., the company entered into the press industry by buying out four national magazines. In 1974, Rizzoli entered into the publishing industry and has since become a leader in the fields of art, architecture, interior design, photography, haute couture, and gastronomy. The company is internationally recognized for its diverse range of titles as…

In 1930, J.I. Rodale, widely recognized as the father of the American organic movement, originally founded Rodale Inc., publisher of health and wellness magazines and books. Soon after putting some of his revolutionary horticulture theories into practice on a 60-acre farm near Emmaus, Pennsylvania, Rodale launched Organic Farming and Gardening Magazine, which taught readers how to grow better food by cultivating healthier soil using…

Elbert Hubbard was one of the most influential forces in American business as the new century opened and the Roycroft artisan community that he founded in East Aurora, New York was the first and most successful purveyor of Arts and Crafts in the nation.

After a brief stint at Harvard during the summer of 1893, which was followed by a walking tour of England,…

Sylvia Beach, an American expatriate, opened the original Shakespeare and Company, an English-language bookshop in the heart of Paris, in the 1920s. The bookshop and lending library became a hangout and lodge for Lost Generation writers such as Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, and Joyce — whose Ulysses was first published in its complete form by Beach because authorities in Britain…

Shambhala is an independent publishing company founded in 1969 by Samuel Bercholz (current now Chairman and Editor-in-Chief) and Michael Fagan in the back of a bookstore on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley, California. The name of the publication was inspired by the Sanskrit word “Shambhala,” which refers to a mystical kingdom hidden beyond the snowpeaks of the Himalayas, according to the Tibetan Buddhist tradition. Shambhala…

The publishing house Sheed and Ward was founded by Catholic activists Frank Sheed and Maisie Ward in London, England in 1926. Their publications include such religious topics as spirituality, pastoral ministry, catechetics, theology, medical ethics, and moral theology.

The head office of Sheed and Ward was moved to New York City in 1933. After a dwindling output in the 1970s, the publishing house changed hands…

Originally based in Buckinghamshire, Shire Publications was founded in 1962 by John Rotheroe with the publication of Discovering East Suffolk (1962). The 24-page guide to the county — through a series of five motoring routes and a gazetteer of the main towns and villages — was initially given away to visitors via coach operators, local churches, and tourist information points. The book was…

The publishing partnership of Francis Scott Street and Francis Shubael Smith began in 1855 when they took over a broken-down fiction magazine. The pair bought the existing New York Weekly Dispatch in 1858. Smith was the company president from 1855 until his 1887 retirement, succeeded by his son Ormond Gerald Smith. Following the death of Street in 1883 and the death of Smith in…

Subterranean Press — also referred to as simply SubPress — is best known for genre fiction, primarily horror, suspense and dark mystery, fantasy, and science fiction. Founded in 1995, the small press, based in Burton, Michigan, has published some of the most popular and greatest genre authors, including Stephen King, Carlos Ruiz Zafon, Harlan Ellison, Joe Hill, Peter Straub, and…

Douglas Messerli founded Sun & Moon Press (supported by the Contemporary Arts Education Project, Inc.) in 1975 with the first publication of Sun & Moon, a magazine co-edited by his longtime partner, Howard Fox. The internationally recognized journal focused on contemporary and experimental writing and art.

By the late 1970s, Sun & Moon began to publish books, its first being Djuna Barnes’ Smoke, which…

T. Fisher Unwin was founded in 1882 by Thomas Fisher Unwin, who also jointly founded The Publishers Association in 1896. His nephew, the more famous Stanley Unwin began his career by working in his uncle?s firm. In 1914, Stanley Unwin purchased a controlling interest in the form of George Allen and Sons, establishing George Allen and Unwin, which later became Allen and Unwin. Thomas…

Benedikt Taschen founded his namesake company, which grew to become one of the most successful and unique publishers in the global market, when he was just eighteen years old. Taschen opened a comic book shop in 1980 in Cologne, Germany, to trade and sell his massive collection and was soon publishing catalogs to promote his wares. A few years later, he purchased 40,000 remainder…

After serving as an apprentice to his uncle Karl Tauchnitz, an eminent printer-publisher who had introduced stereotyping to Germany, twenty-year-old Christian Bernhard Tauchnitz founded Tauchnitz publishing firm in 1837. Quite early, Christian decided specialize in publishing editions in foreign languages, particularly English. The German publisher introduced the first volume of the Tauchnitz Collection of British Authors in 1842 and went on the produced some…

The Crime Club, Inc., an imprint of the Doubleday publishing company, was one of the best-known publishing imprints in the crime and mystery genre. The imprint’s first publication was Kay Cleaver Strahan’s The Desert Moon Mystery in 1928. By the end of its first year, Crime Club featured 27 titles in total by 9 American authors. Indeed, the imprint is responsible for first…

The Golden Cockerel Press was founded in 1920 as a cooperative with four partners: Hal Taylor, Bee Blackburn, Pran Pyper, and Ethelwynne Stewart McDowell, but by the next year, Blackburn and Pyper had left. In 1923, the press published The Wedding Songs of Spenser with color wood engravings by Ethelbert White, the first illustrated book from the press and a foretaste of editions to…

Until the early 1890s, The Mershon company was mainly a printer, but by the late 1890s, it had begun to publish the books of several bankrupt companies (Cassell & Co., Merriam Co.) In 1899, Mershon began publishing juvenile titles as well as publisher’s series under its own imprint. The name of the company changed briefly to Stitt Publishing Company in 1905, but by the…

Ticknor and Fields was an American publishing company based in Boston, Massachusetts. It is perhaps best known as the publisher of Henry David Thoreau’s Walden or Life in the Woods and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter as well as other works of prominent nineteenth century authors.

William Davis Ticknor and John Allen established the business, which operated out of the Old Corner Bookstore,…

Since its founding by Tom Doherty in 1980, Tor Books has won every major science fiction and fantasy award, and for 25 consecutive years, has won the Locus Award for Best Science Fiction Publisher. The publisher was sold to St. Martin’s Press in 1986 and later became part of the Holtzbrinck group, now known as Macmillan Publishers.

Tor is one of the two primary imprints…

Vanguard Press is a United States publishing house established with the Garland Fund — a $100,000 grant from the left wing American Fund for Public Service. The respected independent literary house of over 62 years mass-marketed less expensive books on an array of radical topics, including studies of the Soviet Union, socialist theory, and politically oriented fiction by a range of writers. Though prices…

Vertigo Comics was an imprint of the American publishing company DC Comics. Launched in 1993, Vertigo was created to be a home for DC's more mature content. It was announced in June 2019 that Vertigo would be discontinued in January 2020 as DC restructures to consolidate their offerings under one brand name.

Vertigo allowed DC to publish stories with graphic or adult content that was…

Vintage Books was founded in 1954 by Alfred A. Knopf as a trade paperback home to its authors. This imprint’s diverse publishing list includes canonical works of world literature, contemporary fiction, and distinguished non-fiction.

Vintage Books has published numerous significant writers such as William Faulkner, Vladimir Nabokov, Albert Camus, Ralph Ellison, Dashiell Hammett, William Styron, A.S. Byatt,

In 1923, William Warder Norton and his wife, Mary Dows Herter, began transcribing and publishing the lectures delivered at the People’s Institute in New York City. At their humble living room table, the Nortons assembled the lectures into pamphlets and then boxed them in sets of 20 to be sold. Soon they acquired a wider range of manuscripts—entering the fields of philosophy, music, and…

Founded (in its present form) in 1957, Wesleyan University Press is part of Connecticut’s Wesleyan University - the smallest college or university in the nation to have its own press, which publishes approximately 25 books each year. The Press’s poetry series, now the second-oldest in the nation, was nurtured in its infancy by noted poet Richard Wilbur, then an English professor at the University.…

Initially printing titles for other publishers in order to get his feet on the ground, Charles Wiley opened a small lower Manhattan printing shop in 1807. Little did he know, Wiley’s firm would grow to publish the works of more than 450 Nobel laureates in every Nobel Prize category: Literature, Economics, Physiology/Medicine, Physics, Chemistry, and Peace.

In 1814, Wiley and partner Cornelius Van Winkle expanded…

The Scottish publishing firm William Blackwood and Sons was founded in 1804 when Blackwood opened an Edinburgh shop for old, rare, and curious books and then gradually drifted into publishing on his own account. In 1817, Blackwood published the first number of the Edinburgh Monthly Magazine, which was eventually named Blackwood’s Magazine. Blackwood was succeeded by his sons Alexander, Robert, and John, who added…

Workers Library Publishers was the Workers Party of America’s New York City-based publishing house for pamphlets, focusing on propaganda pamphlets official Workers Party magazines. (International Publishers was the party’s book publishing house.)

Founded in 1921, the Workers Party of America was the name of the legal party organization that supported the Marxist-Lenin ideology. Before establishing its own publishing houses, the Workers Party…