Charles Scribner's Sons

Charles Scribner's Sons was an old and cautious house by the time it became the publisher of the American 1920s, which is most of what makes the story interesting. It was founded in New York in 1846 by Charles Scribner and Isaac D. Baker as Baker & Scribner. Baker died in 1850 and Scribner bought out his share. The firm took its final name in 1878, seven years after the founder's death, when his sons ran it. The second Charles Scribner became president in 1879 and held the job for fifty-one years, publishing Henry James, Edith Wharton, John Galsworthy, and Theodore Roosevelt.

The magazines came first and mattered longer than most publishers' do. Scribner's Monthly began in 1870 and was sold in 1881, becoming The Century Magazine; the sale barred the house from running another magazine for five years. When the bar expired it launched Scribner's Magazine, which published from January 1887 until May 1939 and paid for serial rights on a scale that could decide where a novelist went. In 1929 it gave Ernest Hemingway $16,000 to serialise A Farewell to Arms, reportedly the most it had ever paid for a serial, and then watched the Boston police keep the June issue off the city's newsstands.

The address is part of the identity. In 1913 the house moved into a building of its own at 597 Fifth Avenue, designed by Ernest Flagg, who was the second Charles Scribner's brother-in-law and had built the firm's previous premises downtown. It opened on 18 May 1913, with a bookshop behind a tall vaulted storefront and the editorial offices above it. New York designated the exterior a landmark in 1982 and the shop interior in 1989, the year the bookstore closed. A clothing retailer occupies the shopfront now.

Maxwell Perkins joined the advertising department in 1910 and moved to the editorial staff in 1914, and the list he assembled over the next thirty-three years is the reason the house is remembered. He forced through This Side of Paradise in 1919 over the objections of older men in the firm and had F. Scott Fitzgerald for the rest of Fitzgerald's life. He spent two years prising Hemingway loose from Boni & Liveright and published The Sun Also Rises in 1926. He cut Thomas Wolfe's first manuscript into Look Homeward, Angel in 1929. He published Ring Lardner, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, and, from 1941, Martha Gellhorn. Several of those books reached print with dashes where words had been, because Perkins had to carry every obscenity argument to his employer in person.

The house did not stop when he died in 1947. Alan Paton's Cry, the Beloved Country, which Perkins had accepted from an unsolicited typescript, appeared the following February; James Jones's From Here to Eternity followed in 1951 and Kurt Vonnegut's first novel in 1952. The Scribner Illustrated Classics, with N. C. Wyeth's paintings, had been selling steadily since before the First World War, and a large reference division ran alongside the trade list.

Independence ended in stages. Scribner's merged with Atheneum in 1978 to form the Scribner Book Companies, and was absorbed into Macmillan in 1984, which ended the family's ownership after a hundred and thirty-eight years. Simon & Schuster acquired Macmillan's American operations in 1994; the reference division and its trademarks were sold separately in 1998 and now sit with Cengage. Scribner survives as a Simon & Schuster imprint, and it is still the American publisher of Hemingway, which is why the paperbacks on this site's shelves carry the name.