A beautiful, head-turning façade on Fifth Avenue at 48th Street belongs to one of New York’s most venerable publishing houses – Scribner’s. Scribner Book Store was located on the ground floor, while the publishing company’s offices occupied the floors above. The building was designed from the start for this dual purpose: a bookstore on the ground floor and the publishing company’s headquarters upstairs.
The publishing house was founded in 1846 by Charles Scribner. Nearly seven decades later, in 1913, the company moved into its new elegant home on Fifth Avenue, designed by architect Ernest Flagg, who happened to be Charles Scribner’s brother-in-law.
Scribner’s would become closely associated with some of the most important American writers of the 20th century.
Fitzgerald and Scribner
While a student at Princeton, F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote a novel originally called The Romantic Egotist. In 1917, while serving in the Army, he submitted the manuscript to Charles Scribner’s Sons.
It was rejected.
But the legendary Scribner editor Maxwell Perkins encouraged the young writer to revise and resubmit it.
Fitzgerald took his advice. He substantially revised the novel, renamed it This Side of Paradise, and submitted it again in 1919.
Scribner accepted it, launching F. Scott Fitzgerald’s literary career.
Published in 1920, when Fitzgerald was just 23, This Side of Paradise was an immediate commercial success and established him as a major new literary voice.
Perkins continued to edit Fitzgerald’s work, and Scribner went on to publish The Beautiful and Damned and The Great Gatsby.
Hemingway
By the mid-1920s, Ernest Hemingway was already known in the literary circles of Paris. Hemingway and Fitzgerald met there, and Fitzgerald became an enthusiastic admirer of his writing. Hemingway was looking for an American publisher when Fitzgerald encouraged Maxwell Perkins to take notice of Hemingway’s work. Scribner published The Torrents of Spring in 1926, followed that same year by The Sun Also Rises. Hemingway eventually became one of Perkins’s most important authors. The partnership continued for decades, producing some of Hemingway’s best-known works, including A Farewell to Arms, For Whom the Bell Tolls, and The Old Man and the Sea.
The End of an Era
The Scribner family’s connection with the building ended in 1984, when the Fifth Avenue property was sold. The bookstore, however, survived for several more years and finally closed in 1989.
Fortunately, the building itself had already been protected. Its exterior was designated a New York City landmark in 1982, preserving Ernest Flagg’s elegant Beaux-Arts façade.
And there is one particularly wonderful detail to look for: the façade contains four medallions honoring great figures in the history of printing—Benjamin Franklin, William Caxton, Johann Gutenberg, and Aldus Manutius.
Scribner’s isn’t just a beautiful Fifth Avenue building. It’s a piece of American literary history.
And, remarkably, it is recognized as the only New York City landmark building originally designed specifically to house a bookstore.
Leave a Reply