| Parent company | Penguin Young Readers Group (Penguin Group) |
|---|---|
| Founded | 1898 |
| Country of origin | United States |
| Headquarters location | New York City |
| Official website | http://us.penguingroup.com |
Grosset & Dunlap is a United States book publisher founded in 1898.
The company was purchased by G. P. Putnam's Sons in 1982[1] and today is part of the British publishing conglomerate, Pearson PLC through its American subsidiary Penguin Group.
Today, through the Penguin Group they publish approximately 170 titles a year, including licensed children's books for such properties as Miss Spider, Strawberry Shortcake, Super WHY!, Charlie and Lola, Nova the Robot, Weebles, Bratz, Sonic X, The Wiggles, and Atomic Betty. Grosset & Dunlap also publishes Dick and Jane children's books and, through Platt & Munk, The Little Engine That Could.
Grosset & Dunlap is historically known for its photoplay editions and juvenile series books such as the Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, The Bobbsey Twins, Tom Swift, Cherry Ames and other books from their former ownership of the Stratemeyer Syndicate (currently owned by Simon & Schuster). Today, Grosset & Dunlap's new juvenile series include Dish, Camp Confidential, Flirt (books), Katie Kazoo, Dragon Slayers' Academy, and Henry Winkler and Lin Oliver's Hank Zipzer series.
Grosset & Dunlap obtained permission from Little, Brown, to reprint Thornton Burgess's many children's books, and began issuing the "Bedtime Stories" series (20 books originally published 1913 - 1919, including such titles as "The Adventures of Reddy Fox" and "The Adventures of Chatterer the Red Squirrel") in 1949. While the original Little, Brown editions had plates of high quality paper for the illustrations, the Grosset & Dunlap editions were to print the illustrations on the same stock as the text, so they commissioned the original artist, Harrison Cady, to recreate the illustrations as line drawings appropriate for that type of paper, and to create many additional illustrations. Where the original Little, Brown editions had six full-page illustrations, the Grosset & Dunlap had 14 (fourteen) full-page drawings plus many smaller drawings placed throughout the text. Cady had matured as an artist in the decades since the original Little, Brown illustrations, and although the line drawings he did for Grosset & Dunlap are simpler than the illustrations he had made for Little, Brown, they are generally more charming, while the original Little, Brown illustrations better convey Cady's remarkable vision for Burgess' creatures. Grosset & Dunlap published these as hardcovers with dustjackets from 1949 - 1957, then as pink hardcovers without dust jackets from about 1962 into the 1970s. Then they issued them with library bindings in 1977. In most cases, the latest date printed anywhere in the book was from the early 1940s, so the Grosset & Dunlap editions are today often mistaken for being older than they are. In the 1980s, Little, Brown, now owned by Penguin, cancelled their permission for Grosset & Dunlap to publish the Burgess books. For most of the titles, the Harrison Cady illustrations commissioned by Grosset & Dunlap have never been published since then. An exception is the 2000 Dover edition of "The Adventures of Paddy the Beaver", which has all of them (the illustrations in most of the Dover editions are not the Grosset & Dunlap commissions). [2]
In the 1970s and 1980s, the company's Charter Books (also known as Ace Charter) imprint published mystery fiction, most notably the Leslie Charteris series, The Saint.
In 1978, the company drew a great deal of attention with its publication of RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon. The preparation of the book was alluded to briefly in the 2008 Oscar-nominated film Frost/Nixon, which chronicled and dramatized a series of interviews with the disgraced ex-president conducted by British television personality David Frost. Shortly after the aforementioned interviews aired among great publicity, the copy editor Grosset & Dunlap sent to San Clemente to work on the book with Nixon's staff was, ironically and purely coincidentally, named David Frost.
Grosset & Dunlap also published a series of literary classics which they called the Illustrated Junior Library. This series, published with colorful illustrations, included such titles as Heidi, a very expurgated edition of Gulliver's Travels, Swiss Family Robinson, The Boy's King Arthur (published under the title King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table), and The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (a 1956 reprinting of the 1944 edition with new illustrations by Evelyn Copelman, and published under the title The Wizard of Oz). This edition is still in print, and although less well-known than the Denslow version, is very likely a collectors item to many. [3]
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