Crowell-Collier Publishing Company
Crowell-Collier Publishing Company was an American publisher that owned the popular magazines Collier's, Woman's Home Companion and The American Magazine. Crowell's subsidiary, P.F. Collier and Son, published Collier's Encyclopedia, the Harvard Classics, and general interest books.
The company was founded in 1877 in Springfield, Ohio, by agricultural tool manufacturer P. P. Mast with a single magazine, Farm & Fireside , to sell farm tools and implements. By 1881, Mast had relinquished control to John S. Crowell who expanded the company by purchasing Home Companion.
After P. P. Mast's death in 1898, Crowell obtained control of the company and established it as the Crowell Publishing Company. Crowell Publishing expanded its magazine holdings with The American Magazine in 1911 and the weekly Collier's in 1919. At one point Collier's weekly had over 1.25 million subscribers.
After shuttering the magazine operations in 1956, the Crowell-Collier Publishing Company merged with the American Macmillan Company in 1960 and became a large educational company with subsidiaries for books, textbooks, correspondence schools and other educational tools and materials. The company officially changed its name to Macmillan, Inc. in 1973.
Early history
The Crowell-Collier Publishing Company had its roots in the agricultural trade of the 19th century. Industrialist Phineas P. Mast, the owner of P. P. Mast, manufactured farm and agricultural tools, and he wanted a magazine to promote his products. Mast made wind engines, pumps, plows and mowers in Springfield, Ohio. Mast hired John S. Crowell away from the successful Home and Farm of Louisville in 1877 to manage the new bi-monthly farm journal called Farm & Fireside. By the 1890s, Farm & Fireside maintained a circulation of over half a million. Mast relinquished his role as acting executive in 1879, but he stayed on as an investor. Crowell along with T.J. Kirkpatrick then changed the name of the publishing house to Mast, Crowell and Kirkpatrick Publishers.The publishers soon expanded from the one magazine into other markets. They constructed the Farm and Fireside building in Springfield, Ohio, in 1881. In 1883, they purchased the Home Companion magazine from a Harvey & Finn of Cleveland, Ohio to meet the growing demand for content aimed at women. They bought Youth's Home Library, a similar paper that had been published in Boston, and merged it with their youth-oriented publication Our Young People. They then changed the name of the three merged periodicals back to the title Home Companion, a general family magazine. By 1890 the magazine's subscription had reached 100,000. The Companion had a number of names but was changed to Woman's Home Companion in 1896. By the 1890s, Farm & Fireside was also publishing regional editions of the periodical. After the death of P. P. Mast in 1898, the company changed its name to Crowell and Kirkpatrick Publishers.
20th century
As the 20th century began, the company changed hands again and moved into mainstream magazine publishing. P. P. Mast died in 1898. In 1902, John S. Crowell obtained Kirkpatrick's interests and established it as the Crowell Publishing Company. In 1906, Crowell turned around and sold his interest in the company to Joseph P. Knapp and George Hazen of New York, who incorporated in New Jersey and kept the name Crowell Publishing Company. The new company maintained offices in New York City in addition to Springfield, Ohio.Crowell Publishing Company lost a 1908 appeal before the Board of United States General Appraisers and was assessed countervailing duties on paper imported from Canada.
1910s and acquisition of Collier's and other periodicals
Crowell Publishing acquired The American Magazine in 1911 from the Phillips Publishing Company. The magazine had muckraking roots but with the decline of muckraking journalism it had turned into a general interest magazine. However, an article in the New York Times noted that "the purchase of the American Magazine by Crowell Publishing Company meant that 'the interests' were bent on swallowing up the muckrakers." They pointed to the fact that one of the heavy stockholders in the Crowell firm was Thomas W. Lamont who was also a partner of the newly formed J. P. Morgan & Company. Cleveland Moffett, a known muckraking journalist was quoted, "we are up against the powers of darkness. The right of free speech in America is in jeopardy. They are trying to muzzle the magazines. Several magazines have changed hands recently. They have come under the control of interests, and in each of them the muckraking features will cease. Muckraking, in spite of its name, is a power in this country, standing as it does to promote good citizenship." However, a second New York Times article about the acquisition stated that writers such as Ida Tarbell, Peter F. Dunne, and William Allen White were pleased with the opportunity. A spokesman from Phillips said that "instead of reaching 300,000 readers, we can now reach 3,000,000 readers through our new allies in the publication field. We ourselves were afraid the Trusts were behind the proposition before we looked into it, but all the magazines we affiliate with are insurgent like ourselves, and controlled by persons of insurgent sympathies."That same year, several magazine publishers including Crowell were accused of conspiring to keep up magazine prices through the Periodical Clearing House. According to John Wood, a magazine man whose business had been severely impacted, the Periodical Clearing House was organized by law clerks and employees of the magazines. Wood claimed that ruinous fines had impacted his ability to sell subscriptions. At the same time libraries in the Central Western and Western states complained that the clearing house caused the cessation of club rates on magazines to libraries.
In 1919, the Crowell Publishing Company bought the P.F. Collier and Son publishing firm. This acquisition included the general interest magazine, Collier's the National Weekly, and P.F. Collier's well-established book publishing business. 11] Collier's the National Weekly had roots in muckraking journalism and had one of the largest magazine subscriber bases, with around one million weekly subscriptions. P.F. Collier's book-publishing arm published six million books a year, including popular and serious literature, reference books, and encyclopedias. P.F. Collier and Son was a pioneer in the subscription book business, whereby the company made it possible for customers of modest means to acquire fine literature and reference books, and pay over time with small monthly payments. Crowell Publishing operated P.F. Collier and Son as a subsidiary.
1920s
By 1924, the weekly circulation of Collier's had grown to 1,250,000. Crowell moved its print operations to Springfield, Ohio, because of "excessive postage involved in mailing from a seaboard city under wartime postal rates". The editorial and business departments remained in New York.1930s
In 1930 Farm & Fireside magazine changed its name to The Country Home. Also in 1930, the Crowell Publishing Company and P. F. Collier and Sons were sued for libel by R.B. Creager, a Republican National Committeeman for Texas. Creager sought $500,000 in damages after an article titled "High-Handed and Hell-Bent" appeared in Collier's Weekly. The article by Owen P. White covered a political situation on the Mexican border in Hidalgo County. The jury returned a verdict for Crowell Publishing.In 1939, Crowell Publishing merged the New York operations and changed the company name to The Crowell-Collier Publishing Co. That same year, The Country Home was discontinued.
1940s
In 1940, the FTC charged the publishing company and its officers and directors of the corporation with misleading sale methods and representations.During World War II, Crowell-Collier sponsored publication of a magazine for servicemen called Victory.
In 1946, the Vanderbilt mansion at 640 Fifth Avenue at Fifty-First Street in New York City was razed and replaced with a 19-story office building built by Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, another company with strong ties to Joseph P. Knapp, as the new headquarters for the Crowell-Collier Publishing Company.
in 1949, P.F. Collier and Son published Collier's Encyclopedia, an entirely new, 20 volume work, with the first volumes available in 1949 and all volumes published by 1951. With Encyclopedia Americana and Encyclopædia Britannica, Collier's Encyclopedia became one of the three major English-language general encyclopedias.
1950s magazine closures and book profits
In the late 1940s and up to the mid-1950s, Crowell-Collier's magazines enjoyed healthy subscription numbers, over 4 million subscribers for both Collier's and Woman's Home Companion. However, declining advertising revenues, as advertisers moved from magazines to television, and increased manufacturing and delivery costs, led to heavy losses. In 1953, Crowell-Collier named a former editor of the San Francisco Chronicle, Paul C. Smith, as its president, and later, as chairman, with a mission to save the ailing magazines. Nevertheless, in 1956, Crowell-Collier's magazines lost over $7 million. By December 1956, the company discontinued The American Magazine, Collier's, and Woman's Home Companion. The company also closed its Springfield, Ohio plant, which at one point had employed more than 2,000 people. The magazine closings shocked both publishers and readers. Many in the magazine field deemed it "a foolish and impetuous move", but as the company moved to focus on publishing books and educational materials, the move was seen as shrewd and far-visioned.Even as Crowell-Collier closed its magazines, Collier's Encyclopedia was proving highly profitable for P.F. Collier and Son. Under the leadership of P.F. Collier and Son's president, John G. Ryan, sales of Collier's Encyclopedia increased substantially during the 1950s, rising from 46,374 sets in 1953 to 110,688 sets in 1957. In 1956, John G. Ryan reported a net profit of 20% of on $25 million in sales revenue. supplying the revenue that kept Crowell-Collier solvent as it suffered huge losses from its failing magazine business.
In 1957, outside investors seized full control of Crowell-Collier and installed a new chairman, a paper bag company executive with no prior publishing experience. He pressured P.F. Collier and Son to loosen its sales practices and customer credit standards, and to cut Collier's Encyclopedia editorial budget. John G. Ryan demurred at abandoning his successful business model and continued generating record profits, including a 20% increase in the first quarter of 1959. Nevertheless, on April 2, 1959, the Crowell-Collier chairman fired Ryan and assumed personal direction of P.F. Collier and Son.
Ryan's removal had significant consequences. At a highly publicized April 1959 meeting with Crowell-Collier shareholders, the chairman proved unable to comment on any aspect of company operations. Ryan was soon hired as president of a subsidiary of Grolier Incorporated, publisher of the Encyclopedia Americana. Numerous sales and administrative managers quit P.F. Collier and Son to join Ryan. In December 1960, Crowell-Collier merged with P.F. Collier and Son, ending the weakened subsidiary's 85-year existence. Crowell-Collier assumed the liquidated firm's publishing, editorial, and highly profitable sales financing activities. A new subsidiary, P.F. Collier, Inc., was formed, but solely as a sales organization. P.F. Collier, Inc. expanded sales of Collier's Encyclopedia during the 1960s, but deceptive sales practices, encouraged by the Crowell-Collier chairman, ultimately led to a Federal Trade Commission complaint against the company, and crippling regulatory restrictions on its door-to-door encyclopedia sales.