Thomas Y. Crowell Co.

Thomas Y. Crowell Co. is a publishing company founded by Thomas Y. Crowell in 1834.

History

The company began publishing books in 1876, and in 1882 T. Irving Crowell joined his father in the business. Jeremiah Osborne Crowell became the sales manager.

In 1909, after Thomas Y. Crowell died, T. Irving Crowell became the company's president. Collier was purchased by Crowell in 1919. Then in 1937, after T. Irving Crowell retired, the third generation Robert L. Crowell took over and moved towards publishing trade books and biographies.

Name change

In 1939 the name changed to Crowell-Collier Publishing Co. After the second World War, the company went into decline, and by 1956, their three big magazines were shut down, leaving the firm with nothing but the Harvard Classics and Collier's Encyclopedia. They decided to expand to radio and textbooks but suffered a hostile takeover by Macmillan Publishers in 1960. In 1961, they purchased Free Press of Glencoe. They were sold to Dun-Donnelly Publishing Co., and in 1978, they were sold to Harper & Row, who purchased Lippincott and combined the two into Crowell & Lippincott.

Published works

The company published a profitable line of reference works such as:
*Roget's International Thesaurus,
*The Dictionary of Business and Finance
* a Social Studies Series.
*The Radio Amateur's Handbook (at least 1964-1970)
*The Reader's Encyclopedia, ed. by William Rose Benet

They also published fictional titles:

*Frank Heller detective/mystery series,
*Eight books in the Nine to Twelve Series for older children
*"The Children of the Valley" by Harriet Prescott Spofford
*"Little Dick's Son" by Kate Gannett Wells
*"Marcia & the Major" by J.L. Harbour
*"How Dexter Paid His Way" by Kate Upson Clark
*"The Flatiron and the Red Cloak" by Abby Morton Diaz
*"In the Poverty Year" by Marian Douglas
*"Little Sky-High" by Hezekiah Butterworth
*"The Little Cave-Dwellers" by Ella Farman Pratt
*"The Poetical Works of John Milton" by John Milton
*"Westward the Sun" by Brigid Knight (1942)
*"Poems, Plays and Essays" of Oliver Goldsmith, M.B.
*"Poems: 'Longfellow's Early Poems" by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow