Farrar & Rinehart

About Farrar & Rinehart

Farrar & Rinehart was a New York trade publisher founded in June 1929 by John C. Farrar and the brothers Stanley M. Rinehart Jr. and Frederick R. Rinehart, all three formerly of Doubleday, Doran. Stanley Rinehart served as president and Farrar as vice president, and the brothers' mother, the mystery novelist Mary Roberts Rinehart, was one of the house's mainstay authors. A 1930 title page gives its address as "On Murray Hill, New York".

In 1931 the firm bought the Cosmopolitan Book Corporation from William Randolph Hearst and began issuing college textbooks. Its list included Hervey Allen's Anthony Adverse (1933), which sold more than two million hardcover copies, the first ten Nero Wolfe novels by Rex Stout beginning with Fer-de-Lance, and the Rivers of America series, which won the first Carey-Thomas Award from Publishers Weekly in 1943. Other authors on its list included Katharine Brush, Upton Sinclair, Dawn Powell and Agatha Christie writing as Mary Westmacott.

John Farrar left in 1946 to start a new firm with Roger Straus, later Farrar, Straus & Giroux, and the business continued as Rinehart & Company. In 1960 Rinehart & Company merged with Henry Holt and Company and the John C. Winston Company to form Holt, Rinehart and Winston.

How to identify Farrar & Rinehart first editions

• First printings carry the Farrar & Rinehart colophon, a device designed by Clarence P. Hornung, on the copyright page; dealers cite this device as the sign of a first edition.