Great Grosset & Dunlap!
Although reprints are considered a step down from true first
editions of a book, in some cases they are the only attainable choice because
of scarcity or price on firsts of famous titles. Of course, there are reprints,
and then there are reprints. One well-known publishing house that produced
reprints almost exclusively was Grosset & Dunlap. We love Grosset &
Dunlap books, especially their adult literature from approximately 1925 to 1945
and here’s why: they selected interesting works by respected authors, used
quality materials, and manufactured well-constructed, attractive books and dust
jackets that wore remarkably well and have stood the test of time so much
better than most books of the era. Grosset & Dunlap sometimes produced a
more solid and attractive reprint edition than the original book. Perhaps best
known to collectors for their Photoplay Editions (books on which later films
were based and containing scenes from the film or “photo play”) they also
published popular children’s series books such as The Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew,
The Bobbsey Twins, and Tom Swift among others.
One of the nicer collector’s niches we recently discovered is Grosset &
Dunlap’s “Novels of Distinction” series, which consisted of at least 120 titles
by acclaimed authors. Books in this series had especially high quality cloth
bindings, often with decorated endpapers. The front inside flap of the
dustjacket would state that it was a “Novel of Distinction”, and list all the
currently available titles in the series. These books make interesting
collecting, because they are handsome books, good literature, and can be
challenging to locate. Below are a few highlights from a list of the series
taken from the front flap of A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway, which was
published by Grosset & Dunlap as a novel of distinction in 1929:
• The
• Early Autumn (Louis Bromfield)
• Brief Candles (Aldous Huxley)
• Bright Metal (T. S. Stribling)
• The Haunted Bookshop (Christopher Morley)
• The Moon and Sixpence (W. Somerset Maugham)
• The Sun Also Rises (Ernest Hemingway)
• The Professor’s House (Willa Cather)
• Of Human Bondage (W. Somerset Maugham)
• Marching On (James Boyd)
• The Way Things Are (E. M. Delafield)
…and over a hundred more! The full collection would make an impressive
literature library. Great books – moderate prices, when
compared to the first editions of any of these titles.
To view available NOVELS OF DISTINCTION at Old Scrolls Book Shop, click here:
Grosset & Dunlap was established in 1898 by Alexander Grosset (1870-1934)
and George Terry Dunlap (1864-1956), who started their own publishing company
after they were left jobless following the demise of the American Publishers
Corporation. After some experimentation with placing cloth covers on paperback
books, selling pirated copies of books, and other shaky beginnings, they
finally settled on a system of buying rights to a book before publication, so
the original publisher would deliberately print an overrun and sell the excess
after sales of the original edition waned. Grosset and Dunlap would supply
their own covers & dustjackets to books printed from the original plates.
Later they began to purchase the original plates and publish their own
editions; in this way they could print as many copies as they could sell.
The first book to bear the Grosset and Dunlap imprint was The Damnation of Theron Ware, published with Herbert S. Stone & Co. The
first to carry only the Grosset and Dunlap imprint was Janice Meredith.
The company was purchased by G. P. Putnam's Sons in 1982 and today is part of
the British publishing conglomerate, Pearson PLC through its American
subsidiary Penguin Group (USA). Since the 1940s, Grosset has published the
Illustrated Junior Library, a collection of hardcover editions of Little Women,
Tom Sawyer, and more than twenty other classics. Today, through the Penguin
Group (USA) they publish approximately 170 titles a year.