Charles Scribner & Company

Charles Scribner's Sons

Charles Scribner's Sons is a publisher

The firm published Scribner's Magazine for many years. Scribner's is well known for publishing George Santayana, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Kurt Vonnegut, Robert A. Heinlein, Thomas Wolfe and John Clellon Holmes. More recently, several Scribner titles and authors have garnered Pulitzer Prizes, National Book Awards and other merits. In 1978 the company merged with Atheneum and became The Scribner Book Companies, which in turn was merged into Macmillan in 1984. Simon & Schuster bought Macmillan in 1994. By this point only the trade book and reference book operations still bore the original family name. The former imprint, now simply "Scribner," was retained by Simon & Schuster. The reference books went to Thomson Gale in 1999.

History

It was founded in 1846 by Charles Scribner I and Isaac D. Baker as "Baker & Schribner". After Bakers death Scribner bought the remainder of the company and renamed it "Charles Scribner Company"

In 1870 the Scribners organized a new firm, Scribner and Company, to publish a magazine entitled Scribner’s Monthly. They also launched a well-known magazine for children, St. Nicholas Magazine, in 1873 with Mary Mapes Dodge as editor and Frank R. Stockton as assistant editor. The Scribner family sold this company to outside investors in 1881 and Scribner’s Monthly was renamed the Century Magazine, with the Scribners enjoined from publishing any magazine for a period of five years.

The firm's headquarters were in the Scribner Building, built in 1893, on lower Fifth Avenue at 21st Street, and later in the Charles Scribner's Sons Building, on Fifth Avenue in midtown. Both buildings were designed by Ernest Flagg in a Beaux Arts style.