Dutton

About Dutton

Dutton (E. P. Dutton) is a New York publisher that began in 1852 as a Boston bookshop run by Edward Payson Dutton and is now a boutique adult imprint of Penguin Random House, issuing about 40 books a year.

Dutton opened a New York branch in 1864, moved its headquarters there in 1869 and grew into a general publisher of fiction, non-fiction and children's books. From 1906 it was the American distributor of J. M. Dent's Everyman's Library. John Macrae, who had joined as an office boy in 1885, became president in 1923, and in 1928 the bookselling and publishing sides were separated, with Macrae running the publishing company as E. P. Dutton and Company, Inc.

Dutton issued the first American edition of A. A. Milne's Winnie-the-Pooh on 14 October 1926, the same day Methuen published it in London, and in 1924 it published the first English translation of Yevgeny Zamyatin's We, translated by Gregory Zilboorg. In January 2012 John Green's The Fault in Our Stars appeared under the Dutton name; Green signed every copy of the first printing.

The Dutch publisher Elsevier bought Dutton in 1975, the investment firm Dyson-Kissner-Moran took it over in 1981, and the paperback house New American Library acquired it in 1985. Penguin bought New American Library in 1986, making Dutton a Penguin imprint, and it passed into Penguin Random House with the 2013 merger.

How to spot a Dutton first edition

• Mid-twentieth-century Dutton first printings carry the words "First Edition" on the copyright page.