John Wiley & Sons

About John Wiley & Sons

John Wiley & Sons (Wiley) is an American publisher founded in New York City in 1807 by Charles Wiley, now an academic, scientific and professional publisher headquartered in Hoboken, New Jersey.

Charles Wiley opened a small printing shop in Manhattan in 1807 and later moved into publishing and bookselling. His firm published James Fenimore Cooper's The Spy in 1821, an early step in Cooper's career. After Charles died in 1826 his son John took over, and the firm's nineteenth-century list included Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Washington Irving, as well as American editions of John Ruskin.

After the Civil War, under John's son William Halsted Wiley, the company turned to textbooks and to scientific, technical and engineering publishing, which has defined it since. The firm's present name dates from the 1860s or 1870s; sources give 1865, 1875 and 1876.

Wiley set up its first overseas office in London (1959 or 1960, depending on the source), made its first public share offering in 1962 and listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 1995. It left New York for Hoboken in 2002, after 195 years in the city, and members of the Wiley family have stayed involved in its governance. In 2007 it bought Blackwell Publishing for about US$1.12 billion, and in 2021 it bought the journal publisher Hindawi. Today it publishes research journals, books and teaching materials.

How to spot a John Wiley & Sons first edition