Doubleday (publisher)

Doubleday

Parent company	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group (Penguin Random House)
Founded	1897 (1897)
Founder	Frank Nelson Doubleday and Samuel McClure
Country of origin	United States
Headquarters location	New York City
Publication types	Books
Official website	doubleday.knopfdoubleday.com

Doubleday is an American publishing company founded as Doubleday & McClure Company in 1897 that by 1947 was the largest in the United States. It published the work of mostly U.S. authors under a number of imprints and distributed them through its own stores. In 2009 Doubleday was merged with Knopf Publishing Group to form the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, which is now part of Penguin Random House.

History

The firm was founded as Doubleday & McClure Company in 1897 by Frank Nelson Doubleday,^[1] who had formed a partnership with the magazine publisher Samuel McClure. One of their first bestsellers was The Day's Work by Rudyard Kipling. Other authors published by the company in its early years include W. Somerset Maugham and Joseph Conrad. Theodore Roosevelt, Jr. later served as a vice-president of the company.

In 1900, the company became Doubleday, Page & Company when Walter Hines Page joined as a new partner. In 1922, the founder's son, Nelson Doubleday, joined the firm.

In 1910, Doubleday, Page, and Co. moved its operations, which include a train station, to Garden City.^[2] The Doubleday company purchased much of the land on the east side of Franklin Avenue, and estate homes were built for many of its executives on Fourth Street. In 1916, company co-founder and Garden City resident Walter Hines Page was named Ambassador to Great Britain.

In 1927, Doubleday merged with the George H. Doran Company, creating Doubleday, Doran, then the largest publishing business in the English-speaking world. In 1946, the company became Doubleday and Company. Nelson Doubleday resigned as president, but continued as chairman of the board until his death on January 11, 1949. Douglas Black took over as president from 1946 to 1963.^[3]

By 1947, Doubleday was the largest publisher in the US, with annual sales of over 30 million books.

Doubleday's son-in-law John Sargent was president and CEO from 1963 to 1978; Nelson Doubleday, Jr. succeeded John Sargent as President and CEO from 1978 to 1985, and James R. McLaughlin then succeeded Doubleday in both roles, Doubleday becoming Chairman of the Board.

In 1980, the company bought the New York Mets baseball team. The Mets defeated the Boston Red Sox to win the World Series in 1986 in a 7-game contest.

By 1986 the firm was a fully integrated international communications company, doing trade publishing, mass-market paperback publishing, book clubs, and book manufacturing, together with ventures in broadcasting and advertising. The company had offices in London and Paris and wholly owned subsidiaries in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, with joint ventures in the UK and the Netherlands.

Doubleday sold the publishing company to Bertelsmann in 1986,^[4][5] and teamed up with minority owner Fred Wilpon to buy the Mets in his own name. In 1988, portions of the firm became part of the Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, which in turn became a division of Random House in 1998.

In late 2008 and early 2009, the Doubleday imprint was merged with Knopf Publishing Group to form the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.^[6]

Presidents

• Frank Doubleday, founder, 1897–1922
• Nelson Doubleday, 1922–1946
• Douglas Black, 1946–1963
• John Turner Sargent, Sr., 1963–1978
• Nelson Doubleday, Jr., 1978–1983
• James R. McLaughlin, 1983–1986^[4]

Notable editors

• Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis (Associate Editor 1978–1982), (Senior Editor 1982–1994)

Notable authors

Notable employees

• William Faulkner, worked part-time at the Doubleday Bookstore in New York City in 1921.^[8]

Imprints

The following are imprints that exist or have existed under Doubleday:

• Anchor Books, produced quality paperbacks for bookstores; named for the anchor that (along with a dolphin) forms Doubleday's colophon; now part of the Knopf Publishing Group's Vintage Anchor unit
• Blakiston Co., medical and scientific books. Sold in 1947 to McGraw-Hill
• Blue Ribbon Books, purchased in 1939 from Reynal & Hitchcock
• Book League of America, contemporary and world classic literature, purchased in 1936
• The Crime Club, active through much of the 20th century, publishing mystery and detective novels, most notably the Fu Manchu series by Sax Rohmer and the Saint series by Leslie Charteris
• Garden City Publishing Co., originally established as a separate firm by Nelson Doubleday, Garden City's books were primarily reprints of books first offered by Doubleday, printed from the original plates but on less expensive paper. It was named for the village on New York's Long Island in which Doubleday was long headquartered (until 1986), and which still houses Bookspan, the direct marketer of general interest and specialty book clubs run by Doubleday Direct and Book of the Month Club holdings.
• Image Books, Catholic Books—still a Doubleday unit as part of Doubleday Religious Publishing
• Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, a literary imprint established in 1990. Talese, the imprint's publisher and editorial director, is a senior vice president of Doubleday.
• Permabooks, paperback division established in 1948
• Rimington & Hooper, high-quality limited editions
• Triangle Books, purchased in 1939 from Reynal & Hitchcock; sold inexpensive books through chain stores
• Zenith Books, aimed at African-American youths

Bookstores

• Doubleday Bookstores were purchased by Barnes & Noble in 1990 and operated by B. Dalton.^[9]

References

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Doubleday (publisher).

• Doubleday official site
• Collection of Doubleday and Co. drafts, proofs, and other material re At Ease: Stories I Tell to Friends, and The White House Years by Dwight D. Eisenhower, Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library