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.

US first editions

• Before 1930 Scribner had no dependable first edition mark, though later printings were usually noted in the front matter, so a copy with no reprint note is likely, not certainly, a first.
• From 1930 a first printing carries a capital "A" on the copyright page, and the "A" is taken off for later printings.
• Modern Scribner first printings use a number row containing 1: Stephen King's Scribner firsts from 1998 onwards show 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2.
• Where a number row appears on the copyright page, the lowest figure is the printing, whatever order the figures run in (1 2 3 4 5, 1 3 5 4 2 or 5 4 3 2 1), so a row that still includes 1 normally means a first printing.
• Book-of-the-Month Club copies are usually the same size and quality as the trade edition, so size is no guide. Look instead for a jacket with no price on the front flap and a small blind stamp (a dot, circle or square) low on the rear board. BOMC printed prices on some jackets in the 1970s, but those copies still carry the blind stamp.
• A rear-board mark is not always a club sign: a few very large printings were shared between printing plants, each of which embossed its own mark.