Dial Press

About Dial Press

The Dial Press is a New York literary publisher founded in 1923 by Lincoln MacVeagh and now an imprint of Random House within Penguin Random House.

MacVeagh set the press up at 461 Park Avenue South in Manhattan. It was a separate business from The Dial magazine, though the two shared a building and the magazine's publisher, Scofield Thayer, worked with both. Its first books appeared in 1924, and early authors included Elizabeth Bowen, W. R. Burnett and Glenway Wescott. MacVeagh sold the firm to Max Solap in 1933; after a quiet spell it passed to B. C. Homan in 1938, who moved it towards more popular books; Frank Yerby's The Foxes of Harrow was one of its successes in 1945.

A children's list, Dial Books for Young Readers, began in 1961. In 1963 Dell Publishing bought 60 per cent of the stock, with E. L. Doctorow as editor-in-chief, and between 1963 and 1965 Dial published James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time, Thomas Berger's Little Big Man and Norman Mailer's An American Dream. Dell took full ownership in 1969.

Doubleday bought Dell in 1976 and the children's division went to E. P. Dutton. Doubleday closed the Dial Press on 16 April 1985. The adult imprint was later revived within Bantam Doubleday Dell under editor Susan Kamil, passed to Random House when BDD was sold, and became part of Penguin Random House after the 2013 merger. Dial Books for Young Readers is now part of Penguin Young Readers.

How to spot a Dial Press first edition