Scribner Building (United Synagogue Of America)

History and architecture

This handsome Beaux-Arts office building served for many years as the corporate home of Charles Scribner's Sons, the noted publishing firm now located in mid+own Manhattan. Built in 1893-94, it was designed by the eminent American architect Ernest Flagg, Today it is owned by the United Synagogue of America.

The firm was founded in 1846 as Scribner & Baker. Charles Scribner was born in New York and graduated from the College of New Jersey in 1840.

He studied law but decided that his weak health made him unsuited for that profession, so joined Isaac Baker in starting a publishing house.

The firm's original quarters were at the former building of the Old Brick Church on Park Row and Nassau Street. It soon distinguished itself as a leading publisher of books on theological and philosophical subjects, reflecting Scribner's devout Presbyterian background, but its financial success was assured by such early best sellers as J. T. Headley's Napoleon and his Marshals and Washington and his Generals , Nathaniel P. Willis' People I Have Met , and "Ik Marvel's" Reveries of a Bachelor and Dream Life . Baker died in 1850, and Scribner continued the business alone.

In 1857 he purchased Bangs, Merwin & Co., a British book-importing company, end took on Charles We I ford as a partner, organizing the firm of Scribner & We I ford, importers. He also started a subscriptions department, which published the first American edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica.

In 1865, he expanded Into magazine publishing with the first issue of Hours at Home, later Scribner's Monthly. At the time of his death In Lucerne, Switzerland, the New York Times commented:

"As a publisher, Mr. Scribner was noted for the sagacity, accuracy, quickness and soundness of his judgments. The breadth, liberality, and catholicity of his views, as well as the ripeness of his views, were admirably represented by the character and high standing of the publications that he issued.s.«Of Mr. Scribner as a man it is almost impossible to speak in terms that shall not seem exaggerated to all but those who had the privilege of his personal acquaintance."

At Scribner's death, the firms' names were changed to Scribner, Armstrong & Co., publishers; and Scribner, Armstrong & Weiford, book importers. Scribner's sons, John Blair and, after his graduation in 1875 from Princeton, Charles Scribner II, began to regain control of the companies from the various partners that their father had admitted over the years.

In 1878 the brothers changed the name of the publishing house to Charles Scribner's Sons, which it retains today. In 1881 Scribner's Monthly was sold to the Century Company, and Scribners' agreed to stay out of the magazine business for at least five years. Thus It was not until 1887 that a new periodical, Scribner's Magazine, was launched. Charles Scribner II distinguished himself as a leader of the movement for copyright laws in the United States and as a founder of the American Publisher's Association; he also helped to organize the Princeton University Press in 1905.

Among the many publications issued under his leadership were the American editions of Baedeker's Guides, the Dictionary of American Biography, as well as the work of such distinguished authors as Henry James, Edith Wharton, Brander Matthews, and George Santayana, and British authors such as Robert Louis Stevenson, George Meredith, and Rudyard Kipling.