Sheed and Ward
Catholic publisher

Sheed and Ward is a publishing house founded in London in 1926 by Catholic activists Frank Sheed and Maisie Ward. The head office was moved to New York in 1933. The United States assets of Sheed and Ward have been owned by Rowman & Littlefield since 2002, and those in the United Kingdom are owned by Bloomsbury Publishing. In 2022 Rowman & Littlefield began acquiring books under the Sheed & Ward brand again.
History
Sheed and Ward published a number of major Roman Catholic authors of the 1920s through to the mid-twentieth century, including G. K. Chesterton, Hilaire Belloc, Christopher Dawson, Vincent McNabb, Leo J. Trese, Ronald Knox and Etienne Gilson. In the early 1930s Sheed and Ward operated the Catholic Book a Month Club. In 1973, Sheed and Ward was acquired by the Universal Press Syndicate; the company was used as the base of the publisher Andrews McMeel. However, the Sheed and Ward name and backlist were later divested. The company was owned by the National Catholic Reporter from 1986 to 1998, when it was sold to the Priests of the Sacred Heart. The United States assets were acquired by Rowman & Littlefield in 2002, and the United Kingdom assets by the Continuum International Publishing Group, which has since been subsumed into Bloomsbury Publishing.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Mar 11, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q18636781. VIAF identifies the subject as 154835714. The Library of Congress control number is n85125333. 2 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1926, 1933, 2002 and 2022.
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This entry incorporates text from “Sheed and Ward” 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.