Doubleday (publisher)

Doubleday

Parent company	Random House
Founded	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.

History

It was founded as Doubleday & McClure Company in 1897 by Frank Nelson Doubleday,^[1] who had formed a partnership with 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. was later 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 1927, Doubleday merged with the George H. Doran Company, creating Doubleday, Doran, 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. Douglas Black took over and was president from 1946–1963.^[2] By 1947, Doubleday was the largest publisher in the US, with annual sales of over 30 million books.

John Sargent was president and CEO from 1963–1978, with his son as a business associate in the publishing division.^[3]

Doubleday was sold to Bertelsmann in 1986. In 1988 it 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.^[4]

Notable editors

• Dean Giles McGregor
• Stewart 'Sandy' Richardson
• Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis (Senior Editor)

Notable authors

A L Kennedy A. S. Byatt Alexander McCall Smith Alistair MacLean Andre Agassi Anne Rice Anne Tyler Bill Strickland Christopher Reich Chuck Palahniuk Dan Brown Daphne du Maurier David Allen Sibley David Shields Dolores Hitchens

Felipe Alfau Graeme Gibson Haruki Murakami Henning Mankell Herman Melville Isaac Asimov Jacqueline Wilson James Ellroy John Burdett John Grisham Jon Krakauer Jonathan Lethem Mark Haddon Margaret Atwood Michael Jackson Michael A. O'Donnell

Noah Hawley P. G. Wodehouse Pat Conroy Paul Shaffer Peter Mayle Ray Bradbury Raymond E. Feist Rudyard Kipling Stephen King Stephen L. Carter Tom Vanderbilt Una Lucy Silberrad Vera Pavlova Vladimir Nabokov John Barth

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.^[5]

References

1. ^ http://www.randomhouse.com/doubleday/history/
2. ^ http://diglib.princeton.edu/ead/getEad?eadid=C0858&kw=
3. ^ John Turner Sargent
4. ^ [1] Shakeups hit Random House, other publishers
5. ^ Doubleday Bookstores merged into B. Dalton

External links

• 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