Funk & Wagnalls
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Funk & Wagnalls was an American publishing house founded in New York in 1875 by Isaac Kaufmann Funk, initially under the name I.K. Funk & Company. In 1877, Adam Willis Wagnalls, Funk's classmate at Wittenberg College, Ohio, joined the firm as a partner and the name of the firm changed to Funk & Wagnalls Company. Both founders had trained as Lutheran ministers, and the company's early catalogue reflected that background, focusing on religious titles and periodicals for the clergy before broadening its scope.
The publication of The Literary Digest in 1890 marked a shift to the publishing of general reference dictionaries and encyclopedias. The firm's most celebrated achievement was A Standard Dictionary of the English Language, first issued in the 1890s, which broke with convention by listing current definitions first, archaic definitions second, and etymologies last, an approach that reshaped how English-language dictionaries were organized. This was followed by the multi-volume Funk & Wagnalls Standard Encyclopedia, which went through numerous revisions and editions over the following decades and became a staple reference work in American homes and libraries.
Well-bound, gilt-stamped sets of the Funk & Wagnalls Standard Dictionary or its companion encyclopedia are prized by collectors of Americana and reference literature for their handsome leather or cloth bindings, decorative spine tooling, and their place in the history of American lexicography. The company itself passed through several corporate hands in the twentieth century, being sold to Reader's Digest in 1965 and later to Dun & Bradstreet in 1971, before its name and legacy were ultimately absorbed by World Book, making surviving original sets a tangible link to a once-ubiquitous name in American publishing.
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