World Pub. Co

About World Pub. Co

The World Publishing Company was a Cleveland, Ohio, publisher of Bibles, dictionaries, children's and trade books, founded by Alfred H. Cahen in 1902 and broken up by Collins in 1980.

Cahen, a Polish immigrant bookbinder, started the business as the Commercial Bookbinding Co. After buying the World Syndicate Publishing Co. of New York in 1928, he adopted the World Publishing name in 1935 and opened a New York office. The firm became the largest publisher of the King James Bible. Cahen's son-in-law Ben Zevin expanded it from 1940 with cheap reprints, including the 49-cent Tower Books hardcover line, which sold a million copies in its first year. William Targ edited for World from 1942 to 1964, rising to editor-in-chief. Its Webster's New World Dictionary first appeared in the early 1950s and ran through many printings and revisions.

World's trade authors included Rex Stout, Ayn Rand, Simone de Beauvoir, Lin Yutang, Gay Talese, Michael Crichton and Robert Ludlum, and it published the first edition of Eric Carle's The Very Hungry Caterpillar on 3 June 1969, printed in Japan because of its die-cut holes.

The Times Mirror Company bought World in the early 1960s, moved editorial work to New York and sold the Cleveland printing plant in 1971. In 1974 Times Mirror sold the business to Collins of Britain, keeping the trade list with New American Library. In 1980 Collins-World sold the dictionaries to Simon & Schuster, the children's books to Putnam and the Bible division to Riverside Book & Bible House.