Dodd, Mead and Company

About Dodd, Mead and Company

Dodd, Mead and Company was a New York publishing house, traced back to 1839, that was Agatha Christie's American publisher from 1922 to 1976.

It began as Taylor and Dodd, a religious publisher formed in 1839 by Moses Woodruff Dodd and John S. Taylor. Dodd bought out his partner in 1840 and traded as M.W. Dodd. His son Frank Howard Dodd took control in 1870 in partnership with his cousin Edward S. Mead, and once Bleecker Van Wagenen joined in 1876 the firm became Dodd, Mead and Company. It was incorporated in 1916, launched the literary magazine The Bookman in 1895 and the New International Encyclopedia in 1902, and grew by buying the American arm of John Lane in 1922, Moffat, Yard in 1924, and Duffield and Green in 1934.

Its list included Paul Laurence Dunbar, Robert W. Service, Max Brand, Arthur Ransome and Edward Abbey. Some Christie titles appeared in New York before London: The Murder on the Links came out from Dodd, Mead in March 1923, two months before The Bodley Head edition. Joseph Conrad's The Nigger of the 'Narcissus' also came out first in America, from Dodd, Mead, as The Children of the Sea: A Tale of the Forecastle, ahead of Heinemann's London edition of December 1897. Later Christie novels such as Elephants Can Remember (1972) still carried its New York imprint.

Thomas Nelson bought the company in 1981 and sold it to Gamut Publishing in 1986. Dodd, Mead sold its US rights to Christie and Max Brand to the Putnam Berkley Group in 1988, suspended operations in 1989 and had stopped publishing by the end of 1990.