[PW] Re: Information on publisher

[Dennis Lien]

At 07:05 PM 5/4/2006, Greg Mahoney wrote:
>I'm looking for information on who might now hold the rights to books
>originally published by The Lewis Publishing Company (Chicago and New
>York). It appears the Lewis firm is long out of business, but I wonder
>if any current publishing house now holds the rights to the Lewis books.
>
>Greg Mahoney
>Lombard IL


This sort of question is a menace -- too much fun to do, and too much
fun to stop working on even when I should.  Fortunately it's the end
of finals week here and business is very light...

There's no entry for Lewis in Tanselle:

Author          Tanselle, G. Thomas (George Thomas), 1934-
Title           Guide to the study of United States imprints [by] G. Thomas 
Tanselle.
Published       Cambridge, Mass., Belknap Press of Harvard University 
Press, 1971.
Description     2 v. (lxiv, 1050 p.) front. 26 cm.


A search on WorldCat for keywords

pb:lewis w publishing and (pl:chicago or pl:york)

brings up 21 records, all but one of which date between 1889 and 1915. If
the book in question is one of these, it's in public domain in the US by
now anyway (along with anything else published prior to 1923), so whatever
"rights" the publisher once held no longer exist, and if it's a question
of reprinting material from the book, it's a non-starter.  Aside from one
1905 book on homeoepathy, everything found was a local history of one
sort of another, about locales all over the country.  I suspect they
were basically a job printing concern who only occasionally acted as a
publisher for hire.

Unfortunately for my first results, a little more digging showed many
later books cited in WorldCat as "Lewis Pub. Co." rather than "Lewis
Publishing."  With that form, the most recent I can find is this:

Title:          Wisconsin:
stability, progress, beauty.
Author(s):      Holmes, Fred L.,; 1883-1946, ; ed.
Publication:    Chicago, Lewis Pub. Co.,
Year:   1946
Description:    5 v. fronts. (v. 1-2) illus. (incl. maps, plans, facsims.) 
ports. 27 cm.
Language:       English
Standard No:    LCCN: 47-1358
         SUBJECT(S)
Geographic:     Wisconsin -- History.
Wisconsin -- Biography.
Note(s):        Vols. 1-2 edited by Frederick L. Holmes;
v. 3-5, Wisconsin biography, by special staff of writers./
Bibliography at end of some of the chapters, v. 1-2.

We don't own that, but do own a 1943 set from Lewis: MISSOURI AND
MISSOURIANS by Floyd Calvin Shoemaker.  I checked that; the copyright
notice is in the name of the publisher, but there's no street address
or other information about Lewis Pub/Publishing in the set.

According to the Rutgers "Copyright Renewals" search engine at

http://www.scils.rutgers.edu/~lesk/copyrenew.html

neither the 1943 MISSOURI title nor the 1946 WISCONSIN title had
their copyrights renewed (checked both by title and author).  Again,
if the question about Lewis concerns possibility of reprinting
something they did, I'd check the Rutgers file and doublecheck
against the .pdf files of the appropriate year renewal records
online linked year by year from

http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/cce/

I suspect there's a high probability that any given title was not
renewed and is thus in public domain, just like the pre-1923 titles.

There are several later "Lewis" publishers in Chicago, but none seem likely to
be a continuation of the local history specialist, since none of them show
any signs of interest in local history.  William Lewis and Son (also as
just "W. Lewis") publishes books on music history and musical instruments;
and "F. Lewis" and/or "Frank Lewis Attractions" does filmstrips; and James
John Lewis dictionaries.

There was a "Lewis Historical Publishing Co." in New York city from
circa 1898 to circa 1948, which did also publish local history but
primarily as part of geneaology materials; they don't seem to have
ever had a Chicago connection and given that, overlapping dates, and
different names I don't believe they were related.

A search of the full-text NEW YORK TIMES historical file didn't turn
up anything beyond ads and book reviews (which did refer to a Lewis
set as a "subscription set"), or anything past the mid-1940s.

Here's a 1913 court case involving them, regarding disputes with
the US Post Office:

http://www.oscn.net/applications/oscn/deliverdocument.asp?citeid=418030

http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/cgi-bin/getcase.pl?friend=nytimes&court=us&vol=229&invol=288

and WorldCat and RLIN are choked with records of government hearings etc.
relating to the case.

RLIN shows a book, held only at UC-Davis and U of Michigan, that
finally gives us a name for the original Lewis:

Author: Hill, L.B.
Title:  Benjamin Franklin Lewis, 1842-1928; the man and his business.
Published:      [Chicago, The Lewis Pub. Co., 1936]
Physical Details:       121 p. illus., ports., facsims.
Location:       University of California, Davis, NRLF
Location:       CU-A, NRLF
Call Number:    Z473.L48 H5 copy 1
Subjects:       Lewis, Benjamin Franklin, 1842-1928.
         Lewis Publishing Company, Chicago.
Record ID:      CUDP86-B14050


(Hill wrote a number of local histories for the company.)

No hits on "Benjamin Franklin Lewis" or on "Lewis, Benjamin
Franklin" in the full-text NEW YORK TIMES database, and no hits
close to matching dates in BIOGRAPHY AND GENEALOGY MASTER INDEX.

If you or your client does want to pursue the Lewis thread further and
have access to Chicago business directories and/or indexes to Chicago
newspapers in the 1940s, the place to start is probably around 1946.
(I haven't tried digging other Lewis Pub. Co. books we own out of
stacks or storage to see if they have a street address in them, but
the AMERICAN CATALOGUE indicates back around 1910 their Chicago
address was 358 Dearborn Street, and their New York address 265 Broadway.
Late Lewis publications show only Chicago and not also New York as
location.

If the Hills book about Lewis could be consulted, it may give leads
such as names of children or business associates to try tracking.

However, as I said, if the "rights" question boils down to a desire
to reprint, check copyright renewals first and see if whatever you're
looking at isn't already in public domain.


Dennis Lien / U of Minnesota Libraries // d-lien at umn.edu