Founded | 1963 |
---|---|
Founder | Arnold Zohn |
Country of origin | United States |
Headquarters location | 3 Park Avenue New York, New York 10017 [1] |
Distribution | Worldwide |
Publication types | Books, historical reprints |
Owner(s) | The New York Times |
Arno Press was a Manhattan-based publishing house founded by Arnold Zohn in 1963, specializing in reprinting rare and long out-of-print materials. [2]
Zohn served 48 missions on a bomber crew during World War II, and when he returned home he entered the publishing world. He became vice-president of The New York Times , and later created his own publishing house, Arno Press, in 1963. [2] From the beginning, Zohn's business strategy was to reprint hardcover volumes of historical works and sell large orders to the then-growing number of libraries around the country. [3] In 1968, The New York Times purchased a controlling 51% of Arno Press, and in 1971 they purchased the rest. [4] [5]
On September 23, 1970, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace formally presented the United Nations with a five-volume series set, Issues Before the General Assemblies of the United Nations (1946-1965), published by Arno Press. [6] Arnold Zohn attended the ceremony in the General Secretary's conference room on behalf of Arno Press. Joseph E. Johnson represented the Carnegie Endowment in his capacity as president, and Secretary General U Thant accepted the material on behalf of the United Nations. [6]
Herbert Cohen was named president of Arno Press on July 14, 1975, in an announcement by Sydney Gruson, executive vice-president of The New York Times Company. [7] He had previously served as executive vice-president of Arno Press since he joined the company in May 1972, and before that he was with Xerox Corporation's American Education Publications. [7]
The firm continued as part of Times Books in the 1980, reducing its output. [5] In 1982 many of its titles were sold to Merrimack Book Service. [5] The imprint was licensed to Random House in 1984, then to the Henry Holt division of Macmillan in 2000. [5]
The Arno Press imprint was discontinued "around 1984." [5]
In their book American Woman, Italian Style: Italian Americana's Best Writings on Women, Carol Bonomo Albright and Christine Palamidessi Moore praised Arno Press for the "impressive and valuable array of materials on Italian Americans in the United States" in its thirty-nine-volume series, The Italian American Experience. [8]
Princeton English Professor Autumn Womack notes that Arno Press embarked on "landmark republication project, The American Negro: His History and Literature" which "reissued hundreds of titles by and about Black life" between 1968-1971. [9]
Books
Encyclopedia Americana is a general encyclopedia written in American English. It was the first general encyclopedia of any magnitude to be published in North America. With Collier's Encyclopedia and Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopedia Americana became one of the three major and large English-language general encyclopedias; the three were sometimes collectively called "the ABCs of encyclopedias". Following the acquisition of Grolier in 2000, the encyclopedia has been produced by Scholastic.
James Weldon Johnson was an American writer and civil rights activist. He was married to civil rights activist Grace Nail Johnson. Johnson was a leader of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), where he started working in 1917. In 1920, he was chosen as executive secretary of the organization, effectively the operating officer. He served in that position from 1920 to 1930. Johnson established his reputation as a writer, and was known during the Harlem Renaissance for his poems, novel and anthologies collecting both poems and spirituals of Black culture. He wrote the lyrics for "Lift Every Voice and Sing", which later became known as the Black National Anthem, the music being written by his younger brother, composer J. Rosamond Johnson.
The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction is a U.S. fantasy and science fiction magazine, first published in 1949 by Mystery House, a subsidiary of Lawrence Spivak's Mercury Press. Editors Anthony Boucher and J. Francis McComas had approached Spivak in the mid-1940s about creating a fantasy companion to Spivak's existing mystery title, Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. The first issue was titled The Magazine of Fantasy, but the decision was quickly made to include science fiction as well as fantasy, and the title was changed correspondingly with the second issue. F&SF was quite different in presentation from the existing science fiction magazines of the day, most of which were in pulp format: it had no interior illustrations, no letter column, and text in a single-column format, which in the opinion of science fiction historian Mike Ashley "set F&SF apart, giving it the air and authority of a superior magazine".
Ballantine Books is a major American book publisher that is a subsidiary of German media conglomerate Bertelsmann. Ballantine was founded in 1952 by Ian Ballantine with his wife, Betty Ballantine. Ballantine was acquired by Random House in 1973, which in turn was acquired by Bertelsmann in 1998 and remains part of that company.
Arna Wendell Bontemps was an American poet, novelist and librarian, and a noted member of the Harlem Renaissance.
Yale University Press is the university press of Yale University. It was founded in 1908 by George Parmly Day and Clarence Day, grandsons of Benjamin Day, and became a department of Yale University in 1961, but it remains financially and operationally autonomous.
George Samuel Schuyler was an American writer, journalist, and social commentator known for his outspoken political conservatism after repudiating his youthful advocacy of socialism.
The New Negro: An Interpretation (1925) is an anthology of fiction, poetry, and essays on African and African-American art and literature edited by Alain Locke, who lived in Washington, DC, and taught at Howard University during the Harlem Renaissance. As a collection of the creative efforts coming out of the burgeoning New Negro Movement or Harlem Renaissance, the book is considered by literary scholars and critics to be the definitive text of the movement. "The Negro Renaissance" included Locke's title essay "The New Negro", as well as nonfiction essays, poetry, and fiction by writers including Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Claude McKay, Jean Toomer, and Eric Walrond.
Classics Illustrated is an American comic book/magazine series featuring adaptations of literary classics such as Les Misérables, Moby-Dick, Hamlet, and The Iliad. Created by Albert Kanter, the series began publication in 1941 and finished its first run in 1969, producing 169 issues. Following the series' demise, various companies reprinted its titles. Since then, the Classics Illustrated brand has been used to create new comic book adaptations. This series is different from the Great Illustrated Classics, which is an adaptation of the classics for young readers that includes illustrations, but is not in the comic book form.
The University of Nebraska Press (UNP) was founded in 1941 and is an academic publisher of scholarly and general-interest books. The press is under the auspices of the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, the main campus of the University of Nebraska system. UNP publishes primarily non-fiction books and academic journals, in both print and electronic editions. The press has particularly strong publishing programs in Native American studies, Western American history, sports, world and national affairs, and military history. The press has also been active in reprinting classic books from various genres, including science fiction and fantasy.
Charles Spurgeon Johnson was an American sociologist and college administrator, the first black president of historically black Fisk University, and a lifelong advocate for racial equality and the advancement of civil rights for African Americans and all ethnic minorities. He preferred to work collaboratively with liberal white groups in the South, quietly as a "sideline activist," to get practical results.
David Henry Keller was an American writer who worked for pulp magazines in the mid-twentieth century, in the science fiction, fantasy, and horror genres. He was also a psychiatrist and physician to shell-shocked soldiers during World War I and World War II, and his experience treating mentally ill people is evident in some of his writing, which contains references to mental disorders. He initially wrote short stories as a hobby and published his first science fiction story in Amazing Stories in 1928. He continued to work as a psychiatrist while publishing over sixty short stories in science fiction and horror genres. Technically, his stories were not well-written, but focused on the emotional aspects of imaginative situations, which was unusual for stories at the time.
Infinity Science Fiction was an American science fiction magazine, edited by Larry T. Shaw, and published by Royal Publications. The first issue, which appeared in November 1955, included Arthur C. Clarke's "The Star", a story about a planet destroyed by a nova that turns out to have been the Star of Bethlehem; it won the Hugo Award for that year. Shaw obtained stories from some of the leading writers of the day, including Brian Aldiss, Isaac Asimov, and Robert Sheckley, but the material was of variable quality. In 1958 Irwin Stein, the owner of Royal Publications, decided to shut down Infinity; the last issue was dated November 1958.
Granville Hicks was an American Marxist and, later, anti-Marxist novelist, literary critic, educator, and editor.
William Melvin Kelley was an African-American novelist and short-story writer. He is perhaps best known for his debut novel, A Different Drummer, published in 1962. He was also a university professor and creative writing instructor. In 2008, he received the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Lifetime Achievement. Kelley is credited with being the first to commit the term "woke" to print, in the title of a 1962 New York Times op-ed on the use of African-American slang by beatniks: "If You're Woke, You Dig It".
"The Negro Speaks of Rivers" is a poem by American writer Langston Hughes. Hughes wrote the poem when he was 17 and crossing the Mississippi River on the way to visit his father in Mexico. It was first published the following year in The Crisis, starting Hughes's literary career. "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" uses rivers as a metaphor for Hughes's life and the broader African-American experience. It has been reprinted often and is considered one of Hughes's most famous and signature works.
G. K. Hall & Co. is an American book publisher based in Boston. It was founded sometime in the late 1950s by Garrison Kent Hall (1917–1973), who also had been an accountant. The firm initially, in the late 1950s through the 1960s, produced catalogs, in print and microform, of collections of renowned libraries – notably the New York Public Library. In the 1960s, Betty Jensen Hall’s new marketing strategy increased profits markedly and the firm expanded, producing other library references in the sciences, humanities, fine arts, and music. Beginning in 1971, two years after being acquired by ITT, the firm became a leading pioneer of publishing large-print editions of best-selling fiction and non-fiction books. In 1972 it acquired Gregg Press the scholarly reprint company. In 1973 it acquired Twayne Publishers. In 1989 it acquired Sandak, the art slide publisher. In 1990 it acquired Thorndike Press, its main American large print competitor.
Robert A. Hill is a Jamaican historian and academic who moved to the United States in the 1970s. He is Professor Emeritus of History and Research Professor at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), and Visiting Fellow at The Sir Arthur Lewis Institute of Social and Economic Studies (SALISES), University of the West Indies at Mona, Jamaica.
Star Trek Log is a series of ten novelizations based on, and inspired by, episodes of the science fiction television series Star Trek: The Animated Series. Published by Ballantine Books from 1974 to 1978, the series was written by Alan Dean Foster and edited by Judy-Lynn del Rey. A 1996 omnibus edition of the series was marketed as a Star Trek: The Animated Series tie-in.
Carol Bonomo Albright is an American author, editor, and educator in Italian-American studies. She has published many books and articles on the subject and taught classes at the University of Rhode Island and the Harvard University Extension School. She was editor-in-chief of Italian Americana, a peer-reviewed cultural/historical journal, for over 25 years.