Parent company | Hachette Book Group USA |
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Founded | 1837 |
Founder | Charles Coffin Little, James Brown |
Country of origin | United States, United Kingdom |
Headquarters location | New York City |
Imprints | Back Bay Books, Mulholland Books, Bulfinch Press |
Official website | www |
Little, Brown and Company is an American publisher founded in 1837 by Charles Coffin Little and his partner, James Brown, and for close to two centuries has published fiction and nonfiction by American authors. Early lists featured Little Women by Louisa May Alcott, Emily Dickinson's poetry, and Bartlett's Familiar Quotations. As of 2016, Little, Brown & Company is a division of the Hachette Book Group.
Little, Brown and Company had its roots in the book selling trade. It was founded in 1837 in Boston by Charles Little and James Brown. They formed the partnership "for the purpose of Publishing, Importing, and Selling Books." It can trace its roots before that to 1784 to a bookshop owned by Ebenezer Batelle on Marlborough Street. They published works of Benjamin Franklin and George Washington and they were specialized in legal publishing and importing titles. For many years, it was the most extensive law publisher in the United States, and also the largest importer of standard English law and miscellaneous works, introducing American buyers to the Encyclopædia Britannica, the dictionaries of William Smith, and many other standard works. In the early years Little and Brown published the Works of Daniel Webster, George Bancroft's History of the United States,William H. Prescott's Ferdinand and Isabella, Jones Very's first book of poetry (edited by Ralph Waldo Emerson), Letters of John Adams and works by James Russell Lowell and Francis Parkman. Little, Brown and Company was the American publisher for Edward Gibbon's The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.