Charles Scribner's Sons

The firm was founded in 1846 by Charles Scribner I and Isaac D. Baker as "Baker & Scribner." After Baker's death, Scribner bought the remainder of the company and renamed it the "Charles Scribner Company." In 1865, the company first ventured into magazine publishing with Hours at Home.

In 1870, the Scribners organized a new firm, Scribner and Company, to publish a magazine entitled Scribner's Monthly. After the death of Charles Scribner I in 1871, his son John Blair Scribner took over as president of the company. His other sons Charles Scribner II and Arthur Hawley Scribner would also join the firm in 1875 and 1884. They each later served as presidents. When the other partners in the venture sold their stake to the family, the company was renamed Charles Scribner's Sons.

The company launched St. Nicholas Magazine in 1873 with Mary Mapes Dodge as editor and Frank R. Stockton as assistant editor; it became well known as a children's magazine. When the Scribner family sold the magazine company to outside investors in 1881, Scribner's Monthly was renamed the Century Magazine. The Scribner brothers were enjoined from publishing any magazine for a period.

In 1886, at the expiration of this term, they launched Scribner's Magazine. The firm's headquarters were in the Scribner Building, built in 1893, on lower Fifth Avenue at 21st Street, and later in the Charles Scribner's Sons Building, on Fifth Avenue in midtown. Both buildings were designed by Ernest Flagg in a Beaux Arts style.

The children's book division was established in 1934 under the leadership of Alice Dalgliesh. It published works by distinguished authors and illustrators including N.C. Wyeth, Robert A. Heinlein, Marcia Brown, Will James, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, and Leo Politi.

Scribner merged with Atheneum in 1978 and into Macmillan Inc. in 1984. In 1994, Macmillan was bought by Simon & Schuster. The reference division along with Charles Scribner's Sons and Scribner trademarks were sold as part of Simon & Schuster's Macmillan Library Reference (MLR) to Pearson in 1998, Pearson resold MLR to Thomson Corporation a year later. Thomson Corporation placed the acquired MLR divisions into Gale.

Thomson Learning including Gale became Cengage Group in 2007, Simon & Schuster licensed the Scribner trademarks for trade publishing from Gale.

Simon & Schuster reorganized their adult imprints into four divisions in 2012. Scribner became the Scribner Publishing Group and would expand to include Touchstone Books, which had previously been part of Free Press. The other divisions are Atria Publishing Group, Simon & Schuster Publishing Group, and the Gallery Publishing Group. Susan Moldow would lead the new Scribner division as president.

The Scribner Bookstores are now owned by Barnes & Noble.