Charles Scribner's Sons is a New York City publisher that is best known for publishing a number of luminaries of American literature including Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Kurt Vonnegut, Robert A. Heinlein, Thomas Wolfe, George Santayana and John Clellon Holmes.
The firm published Scribner's Magazine for many years. More recently, several Scribner titles and authors have garnered Pulitzer Prizes, National Book Awards and other merits. In 1978 the company merged with Atheneum and became The Scribner Book Companies, which in turn was merged into Macmillan in 1984. Simon & Schuster bought Macmillan in 1994. By this point only the trade book and reference book operations still bore the original family name. The former imprint, now simply "Scribner," was retained by Simon & Schuster. The reference books went to Thomson Gale in 1999.
The firm was founded in 1846 by Charles Scribner I and Isaac D. Baker as "Baker & Schribner". After Baker's death Scribner bought the remainder of the company and renamed it the "Charles Scribner Company." In 1865 the company made its first venture 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, and later also 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 a well-known magazine for children, St. Nicholas Magazine, in 1873 with Mary Mapes Dodge as editor and Frank R. Stockton as assistant editor. The Scribner family sold this company to outside investors in 1881 and Scribner’s Monthly was renamed the Century Magazine, with the Scribners enjoined from publishing any magazine for a period of five years. In 1886, at the expiration of this term, Scribner's Magazine was launched.
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 Scribner Bookstores are now owned by Barnes & Noble.