Grosset & Dunlap

Grosset & Dunlap
Parent company Penguin Young Readers Group (Penguin Group)
Founded 1898
Country of origin United States
Headquarters location New York City
Official website us.penguingroup.com

Grosset & Dunlap is a United States book publisher founded in 1898.

The company was purchased by G. P. Putnam's Sons in 1982[1] and today is part of Penguin Random House through its subsidiary Penguin Group.[2]

Today, through the Penguin Group, they publish approximately 170 titles a year, including licensed children's books for such properties as Miss Spider, Strawberry Shortcake, Super WHY!, Charlie and Lola, Nova the Robot, Weebles, Bratz, Sonic X, The Wiggles, and Atomic Betty. Grosset & Dunlap also publishes Dick and Jane children's books and, through Platt & Munk, The Little Engine That Could.

History

Grosset & Dunlap is historically known for its photoplay editions and juvenile series books such as the Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, The Bobbsey Twins, Tom Swift, Cherry Ames and other books from their long partnership with the Stratemeyer Syndicate (currently owned by Simon & Schuster). Today, Grosset & Dunlap's new juvenile series include Dish, Camp Confidential, Flirt (books), Katie Kazoo, Dragon Slayers' Academy, and Henry Winkler and Lin Oliver's Hank Zipzer series.

Grosset & Dunlap obtained permission from Little, Brown, to reprint Thornton Burgess's many children's books, and began issuing the "Bedtime Stories" series (20 books originally published 1913–1919, including such titles as The Adventures of Reddy Fox and The Adventures of Chatterer the Red Squirrel) in 1949. The original Little, Brown editions had plates of high quality paper for the illustrations, but the Grosset & Dunlap editions were to print the illustrations on the same stock as the text. They commissioned the original artist, Harrison Cady, to recreate the illustrations as line drawings appropriate for that type of paper, and to create many additional illustrations. Where the original Little, Brown editions had six full-page illustrations, the Grosset & Dunlap had 14 (fourteen) full-page drawings, plus many smaller drawings placed throughout the text. Cady had matured as an artist in the decades since the original Little, Brown illustrations. The line drawings he did for Grosset & Dunlap are simpler than the illustrations he had made for Little, Brown, and are generally more charming. The original Little, Brown illustrations better convey Cady's remarkable vision for Burgess' creatures.[3]

Grosset & Dunlap published the Burgess books as hardcovers with dustjackets from 1949 to 1957, then as pink hardcovers without dust jackets from about 1962 into the 1970s. They issued them with library bindings in 1977. In most cases, the latest date printed anywhere in the book was from the early 1940s, so the Grosset & Dunlap editions are today often mistaken for being older than they are. In the 1980s, Little, Brown, owned by Penguin, canceled their permission for Grosset & Dunlap to publish the Burgess books. For most of the titles, the Harrison Cady illustrations commissioned by Grosset & Dunlap have never been published since then. An exception is the 2000 Dover edition of The Adventures of Paddy the Beaver, which has all of them (the illustrations in most of the Dover editions are not the Grosset & Dunlap commissions).[4]

In the 1970s and 1980s, the company's Charter Books (also known as Ace Charter) imprint published mystery fiction, most notably the Leslie Charteris series, The Saint.

In 1974, Filmways bought the company from American Financial Group, which in turn was sold to G. P. Putnam's Sons[5] when Orion Pictures acquired Filmways in 1982.

In 1978, the company drew a great deal of attention with its publication of RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon. The preparation of the book was alluded to briefly in the 2008 Oscar-nominated film Frost/Nixon, which chronicled and dramatized a series of interviews with the ex-president conducted by British television personality David Frost. Shortly after the aforementioned interviews aired among great publicity, the copy editor whom Grosset & Dunlap sent to San Clemente to work on the book with Nixon's staff was named David Frost.

Grosset & Dunlap also published a series of literary classics which they called the Illustrated Junior Library. This series, published with colorful illustrations, included such titles as Heidi, an expurgated edition of Gulliver's Travels, Swiss Family Robinson, The Boy's King Arthur (published under the title King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table), and The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (a 1956 reprinting of the 1944 edition with new illustrations by Evelyn Copelman, and published under the title The Wizard of Oz). This edition is still in print and may be a collectors item.[6]

Series books published by Grosset & Dunlap

Notes and references

  1. ↑ Corry, John (July 7, 1982). "Briefs On The Arts. Putnam and Berkley Buy Grosset & Dunlap, PEI". The New York Times. Retrieved February 8, 2010.
  2. ↑ Mary H. Munroe (2004). "Pearson Timeline". The Academic Publishing Industry: A Story of Merger and Acquisition. Archived from the original on October 2014 – via Northern Illinois University.
  3. ↑ Thornton W. Burgess: A Descriptive Book Bibliography, Revised and Enlarged Edition, by Wayne W. Wright, The Thornton W. Burgess Society, 2000, page 40, and other misc. sources.
  4. ↑ Thornton W. Burgess: A Descriptive Book Bibliography, Revised and Enlarged Edition, by Wayne W. Wright, The Thornton W. Burgess Society, 2000, page 40, and other misc. sources.
  5. ↑ Corry, John (July 7, 1982). "Briefs On The Arts. Putnam and Berkley Buy Grosset & Dunlap, PEI". The New York Times. Retrieved February 8, 2010.
  6. ↑ http://www.amazon.com/dp/044840561X
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