Little, Brown and Company

Little, Brown and Company started as a bookshop on Marlborough Street in Boston. Charles Coffin Little and James Brown turned the shop into a publishing partnership in 1837. The early firm focused on legal publishing and importing standard English reference works to American readers. It brought out the Works of Daniel Webster, George Bancroft's History of the United States, and served as the American publisher for Edward Gibbon's The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. It also introduced American buyers to the Encyclopædia Britannica and the dictionaries of William Smith.

A 1925 agreement to publish the books of The Atlantic Monthly ran until 1985, a sixty-year stretch that produced titles as varied as James C. Scott's Mutiny on the Bounty, J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye, and Tracy Kidder's The Soul of a New Machine. The list grew through the decades to include Nelson Mandela, Gore Vidal, David Sedaris, and James Patterson. Time Inc. bought the company in 1968; it folded into Time Warner Book Group in 1989; and Hachette Livre acquired the Time Warner publishing arm in 2006. Little, Brown now operates as a division of Hachette Book Group, headquartered in New York.

The imprints cover a wide range of reading. Mulholland Books focuses on suspense. Little, Brown Spark publishes health, lifestyle, psychology, and science titles. Voracious is dedicated to illustrated books. The backlist holds Emily Dickinson's poetry and Bartlett's Familiar Quotations alongside The Catcher in the Rye, while the contemporary list includes Michael Connelly, Elin Hilderbrand, and David Sedaris.

For a reader who landed here after The Soul of a New Machine, The Everything Store, or The Water Will Come, the shelf is wide: rigorous nonfiction about technology, commerce, and the climate; literary and commercial fiction; and reference works that have outlasted their first printing by decades. The list has carried New York Times bestsellers and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalism, giving it a range that stretches from page-one thrillers to books you keep on the nightstand for years.