Book Collecting

Publisher Information

If you're looking for information, history and first edition identification on publishers, you've found the right place.

A.D. Worthington

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 in Washington; or, Life and scenes in our national capital: Portraying…

A. L. Burt

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, he decided to sell affordable cloth-bound literary classics and fiction standards…

A. S. Barnes

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, which was finally established as A.S. Barnes & Co. in New…

Ace Books

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 cents, with serial number D-01. The second title was a western…

Adastra Press

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 and published renowned poets such as Thomas Lux and Ed Ochester,…

Alfred A. Knopf

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 Mercury. Knopf also produced a quarterly, The Borzoi Quarterly, for the…

Arion Press

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 publication of limited edition books. An example of the beautiful combination…

Arkham House

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, Derleth, managing editor, commissioned artist Frank Utpatel to design a house…

Assouline Publishing

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 text in order to convey the message. The graphically dynamic books…

Atheneum

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 great children’s division and a distinguished reference division, merged with Macmillan,…

Atlantic Monthly Press

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 Press was merged with Grove Weidenfeld to form Grove Atlantic, Inc.…

Avalon Books

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 first editions of material that had previously only seen magazine publication.

Founder…

B. W. Huebsch

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 Man.

Avant-garde American poet Ezra Pound, who had been introduced to…

Ballantine Books

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 hardcover. The publisher’s list spanned a variety of subjects with a…

Beacon Press

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 of The Pentagon Papers in five volumes. This complete 7,000…

Black Sparrow Press

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 full-time.

Martin then sold his collection of D. H. Lawrence first editions…

Bloomsbury Publishing

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 company’s rapid growth is essentially thanks to one name: Harry Potter.…

Bobbs-Merrill

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 long-time director, William Conrad Bobbs. Around this time, Bobbs-Merrill, a small,…

Bodley Head

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 control of the company, left to found Penguin Books. The company…

Bottom Dog Press

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 Milton Jordan’s Better Things to Do and Marci Janas’ Lights and…