News from
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY
Communications and Publications, Stanhope Hall
Princeton, New Jersey 08544
Tel 609/258-3601; Fax 609/258-1301
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Date: October 11, 1996
Contact: Justin Harmon (609) 258-5732
"The Company of Writers: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1846-1996"
PRINCETON, N.J. -- What did the writers F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and Thomas Wolfe have in common? The same publisher: Charles Scribner's Sons.
And, besides their name, what did the four successive Charles Scribners, heads of the firm, share? A degree from Princeton University.
"The Company of Writers: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1846-1996," an exhibition honoring the New York City firm's 150th anniversary, opens on October 14 in the Leonard L. Milberg Gallery on the second floor of Firestone Library at Princeton University. It is open to the public, free of charge, and will continue through January 12.
Scribners also brought us Edith Wharton (Ethan Frome ), Frances Hodgson Burnett (Little Lord Fauntleroy ), Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings (The Yearling ), Howard Pyle (The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood ), Charles Dana Gibson (the "Gibson girl"), the Dictionary of American Biography and of Scientific Biography , and the first books of Kurt Vonnegut and Robert A. Heinlein. The firm was also the authorized American publisher of Robert Louis Stevenson (Kidnapped, Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde ), John Galsworthy (The Forsythe Saga ), and the Encyclopedia Britannica (ninth edition) -- and the home for 37 years of the best-known editor in American literary history, Maxwell Perkins.
From a publishing point of view, Scribners has done it all: run a landmark New York City retail bookstore, a rare book department, and a subscription book business; owned a printing press and a bindery; imported books; published its own magazines (including the children's classic St. Nicholas and the flagship Scribner's Magazine ) and textbooks; and distinguished itself in the general publishing business with literary, reference, religious, and children's books.
This extraordinary history -- and literary legacy -- is the subject of the anniversary exhibition. Some of its significant features include:
- The original contract, signed in 1846 by Charles Scribner, Isaac D. Baker and New York City bookseller John S. Taylor, that began the publishing business "Baker & Scribner."
- The firm's first three copyrighted publications, foreshadowing its reputation in literature, religious works, and reference books.
- Works by well-known Scribner artists Howard Pyle, A. B. Frost, Maxfield Parrish, Charles Dana Gibson, and N. C. Wyeth, including several oil paintings by the latter (courtesy of the Brandywine River Museum), which were commissioned for the Scribner Illustrated Classics series.
- Oil portraits of the successive heads (Charles Scribners) of the firm.
- Contemporary photographs of the New York City Scribner buildings designed by the American Beaux-Arts architect Ernest Flagg.
- First issues of all of the Scribner magazines: Hours at Home (1865), The Book Buyer (1867), Scribner's Monthly (1870), St. Nicholas (1873), and Scribner's Magazine (1887).
- A 19th-century Scribner bookcase presenting a selection of some of the best-known Scribner publications during the firm's first half-century. Authors remembered from this period include J. T. Headley, T. S. Arthur, N. P. Willis, Donald Grant Mitchell ("Ik. Marvel"), Philip Schaff, Horace Bushnell, J. G. Holland, Arnold Guyot, Mary Virginia Terhune ("Marion Harland"), Frank Stockton, Henry M. Stanley, Mary Mapes Dodge, Richard Henry Stoddard, Noah Brooks, Frances Hodgson Burnett, Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen, George Washington Cable, Sidney Lanier, Brander Matthews, Henry van Dyke, Robert Louis Stevenson (Scribners was his "authorized" American publisher), Thomas Nelson Page, Harold Frederic, Alice French ("Octave Thanet"), Eugene Field, Richard Harding Davis, F. Hopkinson Smith, George Santayana, and Ernest Thompson Seton.
- A 20th-century Scribner bookcase containing a limited group of better-known titles drawn from the last 100 years. While many people associate Scribners with Henry James, Edith Wharton, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and Thomas Wolfe, few know that Scribners published the first books by such later successful and diverse authors as Kurt Vonnegut and Robert A. Heinlein. Other authors represented include John Fox, Jr., J. M. Barrie, Arthur Train, John Galsworthy, Struthers Burt, Alan Seeger, John Hall Wheelock, Edward Bok, Stark Young, Sir Winston Churchill, Thomas Boyd, Ring Lardner, Will James, James Boyd, Willard Huntington Wright ("S. S. Van Dine"), Conrad Aiken, Jacques Maritain, John Peale Bishop, Caroline Gordon, Marcia Davenport, Allen Tate, Nancy Hale, James Truslow Adams, Reinhold Niebuhr, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Douglas Southall Freeman, Paul Tillich, August Derleth, Taylor Caldwell, Allan Nevins, Alan Paton, Charles A. Lindbergh, James Jones, C. P. Snow, Robert Creeley, P. D. James, Loren Eiseley, and Annie Proulx.
- Some of the stellar reference works that have distinguished the firm's history.
- The deed of gift (1967) by which Scribners began its archives at Princeton University Library, where the records are available for scholarly research. (The Archives provide much of the exhibition material.)
The hours of the exhibition are 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., Monday to Friday, and noon to 5 p.m. on weekends.
For more information (and photographs), please contact John Delaney, (609) 258-3166, at Princeton University Library.