Identity area
Type of entity
Corporate body
Authorized form of name
Little, Brown & Company (Inc.)
Parallel form(s) of name
Standardized form(s) of name according to other rules
Other form(s) of name
Identifiers for corporate bodies
Description area
Dates of existence
1837-
History
Little, Brown and Company was founded in Boston in 1837, when Charles Little and James Brown formed a partnership “for the purpose of Publishing, Importing and Selling Books.” The company was primarily a bookseller at first, as were most publishing firms of that day, and has in fact traced its roots back even further – to 1784 and a bookstore opened on Marlborough Street by Ebenezer Battelle. Mr. Little and Mr. Brown began by publishing the works of Benjamin Franklin and George Washington, and highlights of their early lists include Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, The Letters of John Adams, the speeches of Daniel Webster, and Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.’s landmark The Common Law. In 1859 the company took over publishing rights to a book entitled Familiar Quotations by John Bartlett.