Title page from Farming for Boys
by Edmund Morris (1869) shows the transition of publishing Ticknor and Fields to "Fields, Osgood, & Co." |
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Status | Defunct |
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Founded | 1854 |
Founder | William Davis Ticknor and John Allen |
Successor | Houghton Mifflin |
Country of origin | United States |
Headquarters location | Boston |
Publication types | Books, Magazines |
Ticknor and Fields was an American publishing company based in Boston, Massachusetts.
In 1832 William Davis Ticknor and John Allen began a small publishing business which operated out of the Old Corner Bookstore located on Washington and School Streets in Boston, Massachusetts. The space had previously been used by publishers Carter & Hendee, who hired a teenaged James Thomas Fields as an apprentice. When Ticknor and Allen began their business, Fields joined them. A year later, Allen withdrew from the firm and Ticknor continued business under William D. Ticknor and Company. When John Reed and Fields became partners in 1845 the imprint was changed to Ticknor, Reed, and Fields. Reed Retired in 1854 and the imprint became the well-known Ticknor and Fields.
During these years the firm purchased and printed the Atlantic Monthly and the North American Review. Also in 1842 Ticknor became the first American publisher to pay foreign writers for their works, beginning with a check to Tennyson. These were prosperous years for the firm and they compiled an impressive list of authors, Horatio Alger, Lydia Maria Child, Charles Dickens, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Alfred Tennyson, Henry David Thoreau, Mark Twain, and John Greenleaf Whittier. The Old Corner Bookstore had become the publishing house and meeting place for these authors. Many writers visited many times a week; George William Curtis referred to it as "the hub of the Hub", referencing Boston's nickname, and that it "compelled the world to acknowledge that there was an American literature".