Crown Publishers

Crown Publishing Group traces its roots to 1933, when Nat Wartels and Bob Simon founded the Outlet Book Company in New York as a wholesaler of remaindered books. The company moved into reprints and then original publishing, adopting the Crown name in 1936. Through the 1940s, Crown acquired several other publishers and built a list that included Jean M. Auel's The Clan of the Cave Bear and Alex Comfort's The Joy of Sex. Random House bought the company in 1988, and it operated as an independent division until 2018, when it was folded into Random House's broader adult publishing programs. Today it sits within Penguin Random House.

The group publishes across a wide range of categories. Its trade division handles commercial fiction, narrative nonfiction, biography, memoir, and history. A second cluster covers illustrated and practical nonfiction in cooking, design, and home life. A third focuses on business, politics, and faith. The roster of imprints is long: Crown, Broadway Books, Clarkson Potter, Ten Speed Press, Harmony Books, Tim Duggan Books, Currency, and others, with newer labels like 4 Color Books (founded in 2021 by chef Bryant Terry) and Storehouse Voices (launched in 2025 in partnership with Storehouse In a Box) adding recent voices.

Among the titles WebToTell readers may know, Erik Larson's The Devil in the White City (2003) came out under the Crown imprint. That book interweaves the construction of Chicago's 1893 World's Fair with the story of serial killer H. H. Holmes, and it established Larson as a leading writer of narrative nonfiction. The group has also been home to authors working in biography, current affairs, and practical how-to writing across its various labels.

A reader browsing Crown Publishing Group titles will find a mix: the big, story-driven nonfiction that made names like Larson and Auel, alongside cookbooks, design guides, business strategy, and faith-based writing. The common thread is accessibility and a focus on well-told stories or useful, specific information rather than academic density.