Book Collecting
Publisher Information
Heritage Press
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 of Putnam Bookstores in New York; and A. Koch, head of…
Hogarth Press
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 only, a practice that continued until 1923. But because they were…
International Publishers
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 a Race? (1926), and Thomas More and His Utopia (1927)…
Jargon Society
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) was a poem by Joel Oppenheimer, called The Dancer, with a…
John Day
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 Y. Crowell Co.
John Newbery
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 nature of children were changing; as opposed to being viewed as…
Lakeside Press / Lakeside Classics
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 years in order to stay current with development in fine bookmaking.…
Little, Brown
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 into general publishing, now including works of fiction. In 1925, Little,…
Longmans, Green Co
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 Scott, and acts a London agent for the Edinburgh Review. With…
Martin Secker & Warburg
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, he took his next book, Homage to Catalonia, to Secker…
Merit Publishers
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 documentary works on the history of the early years of…
Methuen & Co.
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, Hilaire Belloc, and Robert Louis Stevenson.
In 1910, Methuen was converted…
Metropolitan Books
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. Notable works from the publisher include Anthony David’s The Patron: A…
Michael Joseph Ltd.
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 in 1938. Joseph published the first edition of the book later…
Modern Library
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 Modern Library to Bennett Cerf, a then twenty-seven-year-old vice-president.
Cerf and…
Mysterious Press
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 being run solely by Penzler, an entrepreneur provided funding. Farrar, Straus…
Naval Institute Press
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 first novel, The Hunt for Red October, Naval Institute Press…
New Directions
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) annual New Directions anthologies introduced readers to the early work of…
New York Graphic Society
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 art reproductions after World War II. In 1958, the company began…
