Cengage Gale

About Cengage Gale

Gale (catalogued here as Cengage Gale) is an American reference and library publisher founded in 1954 in Detroit by Frederick Gale Ruffner Jr., and since 2007 a division of Cengage, based in Farmington Hills, Michigan.

The company traded as Gale Research in its early decades. The International Thomson Organization bought it in 1985, and in 1998 it was combined with Information Access Company and Primary Source Media to form the Gale Group. In 1999 Thomson Gale bought Macmillan Library Reference from Pearson, bringing in Scribner's Reference, Schirmer, Twayne Publishers, G. K. Hall and the large-print house Thorndike Press. In 2007 Thomson Learning was sold to a private equity consortium and renamed Cengage Learning, and Gale has been a Cengage division since then.

Today Gale supplies research and learning resources to libraries and schools, alongside large-print fiction under the Thorndike Press, Wheeler Publishing and Christian Large Print names and new fiction from Five Star.

For collectors this matters: recent novels carrying Gale's large-print imprints are editions of books first published by other houses. Deborah Levy's Hot Milk, for example, was first published by Hamish Hamilton in the UK in 2016, so a Gale or Thorndike copy is a later edition, not the first.