Scribner

About Scribner

Scribner, formally Charles Scribner's Sons, is a New York publisher founded in 1846 by Charles Scribner I and Isaac D. Baker as Baker & Scribner, and the house of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe.

After Baker's death Scribner bought out the business and put it under his own name. The firm launched Scribner's Magazine in 1886. Its best-known authors were edited by Maxwell Perkins and John Hall Wheelock. Scribner published The Great Gatsby on 10 April 1925, after Perkins pressed Fitzgerald to revise the manuscript and talked him out of the title Trimalchio in West Egg; its jacket art, Celestial Eyes, was by Francis Cugat. Tender Is the Night was serialised in Scribner's Magazine from January to April 1934 before the book appeared on 12 April 1934. Scribner was also the American publisher of Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows.

In 1978 the firm merged with Atheneum to form The Scribner Book Companies, which became part of Macmillan in 1984. Simon & Schuster bought Macmillan in 1994, and Scribner is now a division of Simon & Schuster; as of 2023 the trade business was owned by Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, while the reference division and trademarks belong to Cengage Group.

How to spot a Scribner first edition

• From about 1930 Scribner marked first printings with a capital "A" on the copyright page, beneath the copyright notice, and removed it from second and later printings. A Scribner catalogue note gives the start as 1929, while the firm's 1947 statement to H. S. Boutell says 1930.