Ticknor and Fields

Ticknor and Fields was an American publishing company based in Boston, Massachusetts.

Company history

In 1832 William Davis Ticknor and John Allen began a small publishing business which operated out of the Old Corner Bookstore located on Washington and School Streets in Boston, Massachusetts. A year later Allen withdrew from the firm and Ticknor continued business under William D. Ticknor and Company. When John Reed and James T. Fields became partners in 1845 the imprint was changed to Ticknor, Reed, and Fields. When Reed retired in 1854 the imprint became the well known Ticknor and Fields.

During these years the firm purchased and printed the Atlantic Monthly and the North American Review. Also in 1842 Ticknor became the first American publisher to pay foreign writers for their works, beginning with a check to Tennyson. These were prosperous years for the firm and they compiled an impressive list of authors, Horatio Alger, Lydia Maria Child, Charles Dickens, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Alfred Tennyson, Henry David Thoreau, Mark Twain, and John Greenleaf Whittier. The Old Corner Bookstore had become the publishing house and meeting place for these great authors.

The success of the firm was largely in part to the perfectly matched but widely varied talents of Ticknor and Fields. Ticknor gave his attention to the financial and manufacturing departments while Fields focused on literary relations and social aspects of the business. It was also during these years that Ticknor and Fields developed a close relationship with the Riverside Press, founded by Henry Oscar Houghton in 1852.

Upon Ticknor's sudden and unexpected death in 1864 his interests in the firm were carried on by his son Howard M. Ticknor. During these years the business had outgrown the Old Corner Bookstore and moved to 124 Tremont Street. The firm also began to publish "Our Young Folks" edited by Howard M. Ticknor. The younger Ticknor retired in 1868 and a new partnership was formed of Fields, Osgood, and Co. Benjamin Holt Ticknor was admitted at a partner in 1870 and the following year Mr. Fields retired. The name of the firm then became James R. Osgood and Co. followed by Houghton, Osgood, and Co. in 1878 when Henry Oscar Houghton became a partner. The latter would become Houghton, Mifflin, and Co. in 1880, the same year Osgood formed a second J.R. Osgood and Co, which was taken over by Benjamin Holt Ticknor, the son of William Davis Ticknor, in 1885 under the name Ticknor and Company. Ticknor and Company operated until 1889 when it became part of Houghton, Mifflin, and Co. In 1908 the name was changed to Houghton Mifflin Company.

References

*Fiske, John. (1889). "Appletons' Cyclopædia of American Biography", New York: D. Appleton and Company
*Ticknor, Caroline.(1913). "Hawthorne and His Publisher", Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company

External links

[http://www.anb.org.proxy.olivet.edu/articles/16/16-02612.html?a=1&f=william%20ticknor&n=ticknor&ia=-at&ib=-bib&d=10&ss=3&q=4"American National Biography Online"] , retrieved June 25, 2008

* [http://sdrc.lib.uiowa.edu/lucile/publishers/tf/TFINTRO.HTM The LUCILE Project] , retrieved June 25, 2008