Grosset & Dunlap is a

New York City New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the most densely populated major city in the Un ...

-based publishing house founded in 1898. The company was purchased by

G. P. Putnam's Sons G. P. Putnam's Sons is an American book publisher based in New York City, New York. Since 1996, it has been an imprint of the Penguin Group. History The company began as Wiley & Putnam with the 1838 partnership between George Palmer Putnam and J ...

in 1982 and today is part of

Penguin Random House Penguin Random House LLC is an Anglo-American multinational conglomerate publishing company formed on July 1, 2013, from the merger of Penguin Group and Random House. On April 2, 2020, Bertelsmann announced the completion of its purchase ...

through its subsidiary

Penguin Group Penguin Group is a British trade book publisher and part of Penguin Random House, which is owned by the German media conglomerate Bertelsmann. The new company was created by a merger that was finalised on 1 July 2013, with Bertelsmann initi ...

. Today, through the

, 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 Bratz is an American fashion doll and media franchise created by former Mattel employee Carter Bryant for MGA Entertainment which debuted in 2001. The four original 10-inch (25 cm) dolls were released on May 21, 2001 — Yasmin, Cloe, Jade ...

Sonic X is a Japanese anime television series based on Sega's '' Sonic the Hedgehog'' video game series. Produced by TMS Entertainment under partnership with Sega and Sonic Team, and directed by Hajime Kamegaki, ''Sonic X'' initially ran for 52 ...

The Wiggles The Wiggles are an Australian children's music group formed in Sydney in 1991. The group are currently composed of Anthony Field, Lachlan Gillespie, Simon Pryce and Tsehay Hawkins, as well as supporting members Evie Ferris, John Pearce, ...

, and

Atomic Betty ''Atomic Betty'' (retitled ''Atomic Betty: Mission Earth'' for its third and final season) is a Canadian-French Flash animated television series produced by Atomic Cartoons, Breakthrough Entertainment and Tele Images Kids, along with the Mar ...

. Grosset & Dunlap also publishes ''

Dick and Jane ''Dick and Jane'' are the two main characters created by Zerna Sharp for a series of basal readers written by William S. Gray to teach children to read. The characters first appeared in the ''Elson-Gray Readers'' in 1930 and continued in a sub ...

'' children's books and, through Platt & Munk, ''

The Little Engine That Could ''The Little Engine That Could'' is an American folktale (existing in the form of several illustrated children's books and films) that became widely known in the United States after publication in 1930 by Platt & Munk. The story is used to teac ...

.''

History

The company was founded in 1898 by Alexander Grosset and George T. Dunlap. It was originally primarily a hardcover reprint house. In 1907, Grosset & Dunlap acquired Chatterton & Peck, who had a large children's list including the

Stratemeyer Syndicate The Stratemeyer Syndicate was a publishing company that produced a number of mystery book series for children, including Nancy Drew, The Hardy Boys, the various Tom Swift series, the Bobbsey Twins, the Rover Boys, and others. They published and ...

. Grosset & Dunlap is historically known for its photoplay editions and juvenile series books such as the

Hardy Boys The Hardy Boys, brothers Frank and Joe Hardy, are fictional characters who appear in several mystery series for children and teens. The series revolves around teenagers who are amateur sleuths, solving cases that stumped their adult counterpa ...

Nancy Drew Nancy Drew is a fictional character appearing in several mystery book series, movies, and a TV show as a teenage amateur sleuth. The books are ghostwritten by a number of authors and published under the collective pseudonym Carolyn Keene. Crea ...

The Bobbsey Twins The Bobbsey Twins are the principal characters of what was, for 75 years, the Stratemeyer Syndicate's longest-running series of American children's novels, written under the pseudonym Laura Lee Hope. The first of 72 books was published in 1904, t ...

Tom Swift Tom Swift is the main character of six series of American juvenile science fiction and adventure novels that emphasize science, invention, and technology. First published in 1910, the series totals more than 100 volumes. The character was ...

, Cherry Ames and other books from their long partnership with the

(currently owned by

Simon & Schuster Simon & Schuster () is an American publishing company and a subsidiary of Paramount Global. It was founded in New York City on January 2, 1924 by Richard L. Simon and M. Lincoln Schuster. As of 2016, Simon & Schuster was the third largest pu ...

). After George T. Dunlap retired in 1944, Grosset & Dunlap was sold to a consortium of

Random House Random House is an American book publisher and the largest general-interest paperback publisher in the world. The company has several independently managed subsidiaries around the world. It is part of Penguin Random House, which is owned by Germ ...

;

Little, Brown Little, Brown and Company is an American publishing company founded in 1837 by Charles Coffin Little and James Brown (publisher), James Brown in Boston. For close to two centuries it has published fiction and nonfiction by American authors. Ear ...

;

Harper and Brothers Harper is an American publishing house, the flagship imprint of global publisher HarperCollins based in New York City. History J. & J. Harper (1817–1833) James Harper and his brother John, printers by training, started their book publishin ...

;

Scribners Charles Scribner's Sons, or simply Scribner's or Scribner, is an American publisher based in New York City, known for publishing American authors including Henry James, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Kurt Vonnegut, Marjorie Kinnan Rawli ...

; and the

Book-of-the-Month Club Book of the Month (founded 1926) is a United States subscription-based e-commerce service that offers a selection of five to seven new hardcover books each month to its members. Books are selected and endorsed by a panel of judges, and members c ...

. Grosset & Dunlap launched the paperback reprint house Bantam Books in 1945 in cooperation with

Curtis Publishing Company The Curtis Publishing Company, founded in 1891 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, became one of the largest and most influential publishers in the United States during the early 20th century. The company's publications included the ''Ladies' Home Jour ...

. In 1954, Grosset & Dunlap acquired

McLoughlin Brothers McLoughlin Bros., Inc. was a New York publishing firm active between 1858 and 1920. The company was a pioneer in color printing technologies in children's books. The company specialized in retellings or bowdlerizations of classic stories for c ...

. Grosset & Dunlap had an

initial public offering An initial public offering (IPO) or stock launch is a public offering in which shares of a company are sold to institutional investors and usually also to retail (individual) investors. An IPO is typically underwritten by one or more investme ...

in 1961, by which time the majority of the books published were children's books. In 1964, Grosset & Dunlap acquired full ownership of Bantam from Curtis. Grosset & Dunlap obtained permission from

, 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. The original Little, Brown editions had plates of high quality paper for the illustrations, but the Grosset & Dunlap editions were to print the illustrations on the same stock as the text. They commissioned the original artist,

Harrison Cady Walter Harrison Cady (1877–1970) was an American illustrator and author, best known for his ''Peter Rabbit'' comic strip which he wrote and drew for 28 years. Biography Early life and career Cady was born in Gardner, Massachusetts, to a tow ...

, 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. The line drawings he did for Grosset & Dunlap are simpler than the illustrations he had made for Little, Brown, and are generally more charming. The original Little, Brown illustrations better convey Cady's remarkable vision for Burgess' creatures. Grosset & Dunlap published the Burgess books as hardcovers with dustjackets from 1949 to 1957, then as pink hardcovers without dust jackets from about 1962 into the 1970s. 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, owned by Penguin, canceled 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). In 1968, Grosset & Dunlap was acquired by conglomerate National General, run by

Gene Klein Eugene Victor Klein (January 29, 1921March 12, 1990) was an American businessman who was chairman of the board of directors and chief stockholder of National General Corporation, an insurance and entertainment company based in Los Angeles, Calif ...

. National General was acquired by American Financial Group in 1973. In the 1970s and 1980s, the company's Charter Books (also known as Ace Charter) imprint published mystery fiction, most notably the

Leslie Charteris Leslie Charteris (born Leslie Charles Bowyer-Yin, 12 May 1907 – 15 April 1993), was a British-Chinese author of adventure fiction, as well as a screenwriter.The Saint''. In 1974,

Filmways Filmways, Inc. (also known as Filmways Pictures and Filmways Television) was a television and film production company founded by American film executive Martin Ransohoff and Edwin Kasper in 1952. It is probably best remembered as the production c ...

bought the company from American Financial Group (Bantam was sold separately). During this time, Grosset & Dunlap acquired a new paperback publisher, Ace Books. Filmways sold Grosset & Dunlap to

when Orion Pictures acquired Filmways in 1982. 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 ex-president conducted by British television personality David Frost. Shortly after the aforementioned interviews aired to great publicity, the

copy editor Copy editing (also known as copyediting and manuscript editing) is the process of revising written material (copy) to improve readability and fitness, as well as ensuring that text is free of grammatical and factual errors. ''The Chicago Manual of ...

whom Grosset & Dunlap sent to

San Clemente San Clemente (; Spanish for " St. Clement") is a city in Orange County, California. Located in the Orange Coast region of the South Coast of California, San Clemente's population was 64,293 in at the 2020 census. Situated roughly midway between ...

to work on the book with Nixon's staff was named as 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 ''Heidi'' (; ) is a work of children's fiction published in 1881 by Swiss author Johanna Spyri, originally published in two parts as ''Heidi: Her Years of Wandering and Learning'' (german: Heidis Lehr- und Wanderjahre) and ''Heidi: How She Use ...

'', an 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 ''The Wonderful Wizard of Oz'' is a children's novel written by author L. Frank Baum and illustrated by W. W. Denslow. It is the first novel in the Oz series of books. A Kansas farm girl named Dorothy ends up in the magical Land of Oz afte ...

'' (a 1956 reprinting of the 1944 edition with new illustrations by Evelyn Copelman, and published under the title ''The Wizard of Oz''). Putnam merged with

in 1996 In 2013, Penguin merged with Bertelsmann's

, forming

. Today, Grosset & Dunlap's new juvenile series include ''Dish'', '' Camp Confidential'', ''Flirt'', ''

Katie Kazoo Nancy E. Krulik (born in Brooklyn, New York) is the author of more than 200 books for children and young adults, including three New York Times bestsellers. Books Krulik is the author and creator of several book series, beginning with ''Katie K ...

'', '' Dragon Slayers' Academy'', and Henry Winkler and

Lin Oliver Lin Oliver (born February 2, 1947) is an American writer, producer, and the co-founder (with Steve Mooser) of the Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators. During the 1990s and early 2000s, she wrote and produced a number of works for ...

's '' Hank Zipzer'' series.

Series books published by Grosset & Dunlap

Beverly Gray The Beverly Gray Mystery Stories, comprising 26 novels published between 1934 and 1955, were written by Clair Blank whose pen name was Clarissa Mabel Blank Moyer. The series began as a series of school stories, and followed Beverly's progress th ...

(1934–55) *

Bomba, the Jungle Boy ''Bomba the Jungle Boy'' is a series of American boys' adventure books produced by the Stratemeyer Syndicate under the pseudonym Roy Rockwood. and published by Cupples and Leon in the first half of the 20th century, in imitation of the successful ...

(1926–38) * Buddy Books for Boys *

* Camp Confidential * Cherry Ames (1943–68) * Chip Hilton (1948–66) * Christopher Cool (1967–69) * The Dana Girls (1934–79) * Hal Keen * Hank Zipzer *

The Hardy Boys The Hardy Boys, brothers Frank and Joe Hardy, are fictional characters who appear in several mystery series for children and teens. The series revolves around teenagers who are amateur sleuths, solving cases that stumped their adult counterp ...

Judy Bolton The Judy Bolton Mystery Series, written by Margaret Sutton, follows a realistic young woman who solves mysteries. Although the series was not quite as popular as Nancy Drew, Judy Bolton has been called a more complex and believable role model f ...

(1932–67) * Ken Holt (1949–63) * The Listener's Music Library * The Little Music Library *

The Lone Ranger The Lone Ranger is a fictional masked former Texas Ranger who fought outlaws in the American Old West with his Native American friend Tonto. The character has been called an enduring icon of American culture. He first appeared in 1933 in ...

(1936–56) *

* Pee-wee Harris * Peggy Lane Theater Stories (1962-65) * Rick Brant (1947–68) * Roy Blakeley * Signature Biographies * Skippy Dare *

Tom Corbett, Space Cadet Tom Corbett is the main character in a series of ''Tom Corbett—Space Cadet'' stories that were depicted in television, radio, books, comic books, comic strips, and other media in the 1950s. The stories followed the adventures of Corbett, Ast ...

(1952–56) *Tom Slade *

(1910–41) * Tom Swift, Jr. (1954–71) * Tom Quest (1947–55) * The Universal LibraryUniversal Library (Grosset & Dunlap) - Book Series List
publishinghistory.com. Retrieved 22 January 2021. * Westy Martin * We Were There (1955–63) * Who Was...?

Notes and references

External links

Grosset & Dunlap
{{DEFAULTSORT:Grosset and Dunlap Book publishing companies based in New York (state) Penguin Random House Publishing companies established in 1898 Stratemeyer Syndicate

History

Series books published by Grosset & Dunlap

See also

Notes and references

External links