Frank Nelson Doubleday

[
Arnold Genthe.] Frank Nelson Doubleday (January 8, 1862 – January 30, 1934), known to friends and family as “Effendi”, was a famous U.S. publisher. His most significant achievement was as founder of the eponymous Doubleday & McClure Company in 1897.

Frank Doubleday was a native of Brooklyn, New York, the son of a hatter. Early in life he became fascinated with the printing business and by the age of ten he had saved up enough money to buy his own printing press. He earned back his investment by printing advertising and news circulars for local businesses, and from that point never left the business. When Doubleday was 14, his father's business failed, and he was forced to leave school and find a full-time job. He went to work at the firm of Charles Scribner's Sons in Manhattan for the salary of $3 a week. Doubleday spent eighteen years at Scribner's, eventually rising to become the publisher of "Scribner's Magazine" and head of Scribner's subscription book department.

When Doubleday's relationship with J. Blair Scribner soured, he left the company and went into partnership with Samuel S. McClure, publisher of "McClure's Magazine", to form the Doubleday & McClure Co. in March, 1897. The following year, Doubleday and McClure accepted a contract to manage the great publishing house of Harper & Brothers, at the instigation of their banker, J. Pierpont Morgan. On taking control, Doubleday dug thoroughly through Harper's books and decided that the company's finances were in a shambles, and Doubleday convinced McClure and Morgan to call off the deal. (Harper had gone heavily into debt in the Panic of 1893, and the extension of copyright to foreign authors in 1891 put a large dent in Harper's principal business, cheap domestic reprints of respected foreign authors.)

On December 31, 1899, growing tension between Doubleday and McClure led the two men to dissolve their partnership. The following year, Doubleday invited Walter Hines Page, former editor of "The Atlantic Monthly", to join him; the new firm was Doubleday, Page & Co.

In 1921, Doubleday bought a controlling interest in the English publisher William Heinemann, after the eponymous senior partner died unexpectedly without leaving an heir. In 1927, Doubleday purchased the publishing house of George H. Doran, and the company became Doubleday, Doran & Co.

Doubleday was twice married, first to Neltje De Graff, and then to Florence (birth name unknown). He had a son by his first wife, Nelson, who followed him into the publishing business and took over for his father after developing a promising mail-order business on his own (now part of BookSpan). An anglophile, Frank Doubleday spent many working vacations in England looking to sign up authors and publishers for U.S. editions. His personal friends included James Barrie, Andrew Carnegie, Alfred Harcourt, Edward Mandell House, Rudyard Kipling, T. E. Lawrence, Christopher Morley, Mark Twain. Through a cousin, he met John D. Rockefeller and either edited or ghost-wrote Rockefeller's autobiography.

References

* Frank Nelson Doubleday, "The Memoirs of a Publisher" (Doubleday & Co., 1972)