Biography
Scribner was born in New York City to Uriah Rogers Scribner and Betsey Hawley. After a year's study at New York University, he entered Princeton University and graduated with the class of 1840. He began the study of law, but was obliged by ill health to make a trip to Europe.
After returning from Europe, in 1846 Scribner became the younger partner of Baker in forming a new kind of publishing house under the firm name of Baker and Scribner. Unlike traditional houses, which were generally outgrowths of printing companies or book sellers, theirs would exist purely as a publisher. This had an influence on the character of its publications, which were chiefly confined to the works of contemporary authors. It also published Presbyterian philosophy books. With the death of Baker in 1850, Scribner gained control of the company, renaming it Charles Scribner and then Charles Scribner and Company. With Charles Welford (who died in May 1885), he formed in 1857 the house of Scribner and Welford for the importation of foreign books.
In 1865, Charles Scribner and Co. made its first venture into magazine publishing with Hours at Home, a monthly magazine. In 1870 this magazine was merged into Scribner's Monthly under the editorship of Josiah G. Holland, and published by a separate company, Scribner and Co., with Dr. Holland and Roswell Smith as part owners. On Mr. Scribner's death, the next year, the firm of Charles Scribner and Co. was reorganized as Scribner, Armstrong, and Co., the partners being John Blair Scribner, Andrew C. Armstrong, and Edward Seymour, and in 1877 the publication house was removed to 743 Broadway. Mr. Seymour died 28 April 1877, and in 1878, when Mr. Armstrong retired, the firm-name was changed to Charles Scribner's Sons, under which form the business was conducted after 1879 by Charles Scribner and Arthur H. Scribner, younger brothers of John Blair.
The elder Charles Scribner married Emma Elizabeth Blair (1827-1869) in 1846. He died of typhoid on August 26, 1871 while traveling in Lucerne, Switzerland.
Read more about this topic: Charles Scribner I
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“A great biography should, like the close of a great drama, leave behind it a feeling of serenity. We collect into a small bunch the flowers, the few flowers, which brought sweetness into a life, and present it as an offering to an accomplished destiny. It is the dying refrain of a completed song, the final verse of a finished poem.”
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“In how few words, for instance, the Greeks would have told the story of Abelard and Heloise, making but a sentence of our classical dictionary.... We moderns, on the other hand, collect only the raw materials of biography and history, “memoirs to serve for a history,” which is but materials to serve for a mythology.”
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