Little, Brown and Company
American publishing company founded in 1837
Little, Brown and Company is an American publishing company founded in 1837 by Charles Coffin Little and James Brown in Boston. It publishes works by American authors. Early lists featured Emily Dickinson's poetry and Bartlett's Familiar Quotations. Since 2006, Little, Brown and Company is a division of the Hachette Book Group.
History
19th century
Little, Brown and Company had its roots in the book selling trade. It was founded in 1837 in Boston by Charles Little and James Brown. They formed the partnership "for the purpose of Publishing, Importing, and Selling Books". It can trace its roots before that to 1784 to a bookshop owned by Ebenezer Battelle on Marlborough Street. They published works of Benjamin Franklin and George Washington, and specialized in legal publishing and importing titles.
The company was the most extensive law publisher in the United States, and also the largest importer of standard English law and miscellaneous works, introducing American buyers to the Encyclopædia Britannica, the dictionaries of William Smith, and many other standard works.
“Little, Brown and Company” enters the record as american publishing company founded in 1837. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Little, Brown and Company can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Chronology, provenance and viewpoint should be read together before a broad social or political interpretation is accepted. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 17, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q552959. VIAF identifies the subject as 144240696. The Library of Congress control number is n80020835. 1 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1837, 2006 and 1784.
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This entry incorporates text from “Little, Brown and Company” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.