Thorndike Press

Thorndike Press takes its name from the town of Thorndike, Maine, where the company was founded. Books from its later years carry a Waterville, Maine imprint line. In 1990 G. K. Hall, a Boston firm with its own large print list, bought Thorndike, a leading rival in the field. G. K. Hall sat inside the Macmillan library group, and in 1999 Thomson Gale acquired that group from Pearson, Thorndike included. Today Thorndike Press is an imprint of Gale, which belongs to Cengage Group.

The business is reprinting, not first publication. Thorndike licenses books that other houses have already brought out and sets them again, unabridged, in large type. Its catalog covers romance, mystery and western fiction, along with biography, history and lifestyle nonfiction, and it keeps separate lists for Christian fiction and for Black Voices titles. From 1999 it added a youth line of large print reprints for middle grade and young adult readers. These are built to match the size and cover art of the originals, so a student is not handed a book that looks different from everyone else's.

Its backlist mixes recent hits with older standards. Willa Cather's Death Comes for the Archbishop, first issued by Knopf in 1927, appeared in a Thorndike large print edition in 2001 under the Perennial Bestsellers banner. More recent titles include Lisa Scottoline's Most Wanted, Emily Giffin's First Comes Love and Robert Ludlum's The Bourne Escape. Authors for young readers, among them Pam Muñoz Ryan and Jason Reynolds, have been featured at Thorndike events at library conferences.

A reader picking up a Thorndike book should expect the same text as the original edition, with nothing cut and nothing rewritten. What changes is the page. Gale describes its editions as 16-point type, which suits readers with low vision, or anyone who simply reads more comfortably with bigger letters. The books are aimed mainly at public and school libraries, so borrowing is the usual way to find them.