Ginn & Company
 Ginn and Heath, circa 1875 | |
| Status | Defunct |
|---|---|
| Founded | 1868 |
| Founder | Edwin Ginn, Daniel Collamore Heath |
| Successor | Xerox; Simon & Schuster; Pearson Education |
| Country of origin | United States |
| Headquarters location | Boston, Massachusetts |
| Publication types | Textbooks |
Ginn & Company was an American textbook publisher founded by Edwin Ginn with his brother Fred in 1867, as Ginn Brothers.[1] In 1876 it became Ginn & Heath (with Daniel Collamore Heath), and in 1885 it was established as Ginn & Company.[2]
The imprint's first educational book was The English of Shakespeare by George Lillie Craik.[3] Their Grade School Music Readers, by Luther Whiting Mason, were, for some time, a standard music textbook in American schools.[3]
Ginn built the Athenaeum Press in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1895 to house its printing operations, and the company's main offices moved to a brownstone on the site of the former Hancock Manor in 1901.[4] The typeface Century Schoolbook was commissioned by Ginn in 1919 to be used as an easy-to-read type for textbooks. A silent film was created in 1925 to showcase how Ginn produced books at the Athenaeum Press.[5]
The publisher was acquired by Xerox in 1968 during a surge in acquisitions of traditional textbook publishers by technology companies that included the acquisition of D. C. Heath by Raytheon a couple years earlier.[6] Xerox would later sell Ginn to Simon & Schuster who merged it in the 1980s with another acquisition, Silver Burdett Press, to form the imprint Silver Burdett & Ginn. Pearson PLC acquired Simon & Schuster's educational businesses in 1998 to form Pearson Education, and closed down the Silver Burdett & Ginn imprint in 1999.
References
[edit]- ↑ "Industry in Cambridge". History Cambridge. Retrieved 2 May 2026.
- ↑ Textbooks Then and Now (PDF). Ginn and Company. 1933. pp. 8, 11.
- 1 2 Pulsifer, William Edmond (2 March 1921). A Brief Account of the Educational Publishing Business in the United States.
- ↑ Souvenir of the Athenaeum Press. Ginn & Company. 1903. Retrieved 23 November 2022.
- ↑ "Silent Beauties: Ginn and Company (Athenaeum Press) - 1925". 12 August 2011.
- ↑ Moore, John Hammond (1982). Wiley, one hundred and seventy five years of publishing. New York: John Wiley & Sons. p. 206. ISBN 0471860824.
