History
Wiley was established in 1807 when Charles Wiley opened a print shop in Manhattan. The company was the publisher of such 19th century American literary figures as James Fenimore Cooper, Washington Irving, Herman Melville, and Edgar Allan Poe, as well as of legal, religious, and other non-fiction titles. Wiley later shifted its focus to scientific, technical, and engineering subject areas, abandoning its literary interests.
Charles Wiley's son John (born in Flatbush, Long Island, 4 October 1808; died in East Orange, New Jersey, 21 February 1891) took over the business when his father died in 1826. The firm was successively named Wiley, Lane & Co., then Wiley & Putnam, and then John Wiley. The company acquired its present name in 1876, when John’s second son William H. Wiley joined his brother Charles in the business.
Through the 20th century, the company expanded its publishing activities, the sciences, and higher education. Since the establishment of the Nobel Prize in 1901, Wiley and its acquired companies have published the works of more than 450 Nobel Laureates, in every category in which the prize is awarded.
One of the world’s oldest independent publishing companies, Wiley marked its bicentennial in 2007 with a year-long celebration, hosting festivities that spanned four continents and ten countries and included such highlights as ringing the closing bell at the New York Stock Exchange on May 1. In conjunction with the anniversary, the company published Knowledge for Generations: Wiley and the Global Publishing Industry, 1807-2007, depicting Wiley’s pivotal role in the evolution of publishing against a social, cultural, and economic backdrop. Wiley has also created an online community called Wiley Living History, offering excerpts from Knowledge for Generations and a forum for visitors and Wiley employees to post their comments and anecdotes.
Read more about this topic: John Wiley & Sons
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“Anyone who is practically acquainted with scientific work is aware that those who refuse to go beyond fact rarely get as far as fact; and anyone who has studied the history of science knows that almost every great step therein has been made by the “anticipation of Nature.””
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)
“When the landscape buckles and jerks around, when a dust column of debris rises from the collapse of a block of buildings on bodies that could have been your own, when the staves of history fall awry and the barrel of time bursts apart, some turn to prayer, some to poetry: words in the memory, a stained book carried close to the body, the notebook scribbled by hand—a center of gravity.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“There is one great fact, characteristic of this our nineteenth century, a fact which no party dares deny. On the one hand, there have started into life industrial and scientific forces which no epoch of former human history had ever suspected. On the other hand, there exist symptoms of decay, far surpassing the horrors recorded of the latter times of the Roman empire. In our days everything seems pregnant with its contrary.”
—Karl Marx (1818–1883)