Publisher Information

Roycroft Press

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, Hubbard tried to find a publisher for a series of biographical…

Shakespeare & Company

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 and America deemed it obscene. Later editions were also published under…

Shambhala

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 Publications’ first book was Meditation in Action by ChXgyam Trungpa, a…

Sheed & Ward

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 multiple times — including an acquisition by the Priests of the…

Shire Publications

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 so successful that when Rotheroe learned that many of the free…

Street & Smith

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 1887, Ormond Smith remained company president until his death in 1933.…

Subterranean Press

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 George R.R. Martin.

In addition to trade editions of novels, short…

Sun & Moon Press

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 was a compilation of stories Messerli found in various books and…

T. Fisher Unwin

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 Fisher Unwin retired in 1926 and about ten years later, J.R.R.…

Taschen

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 copies of a RenX Magritte book with text only in English…

Tauchnitz

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 5,370 volumes of the series over the next 100 years. In…

The Crime Club, Inc.

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 U.S. editions for many classic and popular works of detective and…

The Golden Cockerel Press

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 come. Early the next year, the business was purchased by Robert…

The Mershon Company

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 next year, Stitt went bankrupt. Mershon took over until the next…

Ticknor & Fields

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, in 1832. Shortly after, James Thomas Fields joined Ticknor and Allen…

Tor Books

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 of New York-based publishing company, Tom Doherty Associates, LLC. Forge, Doherty’s…

Vanguard Press

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 rose over time, Vanguard remained the economical source of hardcover books.

Vertigo Comics

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 not approved by the Comics Code Authority, including explicit violence, substance…

Vintage Books

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, Philip Roth, Toni Morrison, Ha Jin, Richard Ford,…

W. W. Norton

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 psychology—and published acclaimed work, including that of Bertrand Russell,