Bookseller company E.P. Dutton was founded in Boston, Massachusetts in 1852 by Edward Payson Dutton.
Dutton expanded to New York City in 1864 where he began publishing religious books. In 1869 the company headquarters moved to New York City where they had their first bestseller, the two-volume The Life of Christ by Frederic W. Farrar, published in 1874. A deal was made with English publishing company J.M. Dent in 1906 to be the American distributor of the Everyman's Library series of classic literature reprints. In 1923 John Macrae was named president after the death of E.P. Dutton who had remained at the helm. John Macrae had started at the company as an office boy in 1885 and worked his way up the line.
The publishing and retail divisions were split into two separate businesses in 1928 with Macrae taking hold of the publishing side. Macrae would work for the company an amazing 59 years. The company was now known as E.P. Dutton and Company, Incorporated and under Macrae's leadership it flourished into one of the biggest independent publishers in the United States. Among their extensive list of writers were John Hunt, Cleveland Amory, Milton Glaser, Françoise Sagan, Lawrence Durrell, Luigi Pirandello, John Irving, Joyce Carol Oates, Peter Matthiessen, Gavin Maxwell, Gail Sheehy, Ruth Manning-Sanders, La Toya Jackson and Mickey Spillane.
Dutton Children's Books is one of the oldest children's book publishers in the United States. They are most known for their Winnie-the-Pooh range.
In 1986 the company was taken in by the Penguin Group and once again split into two. The imprints Dutton and Dutton Children's books now exist as imprints of the Penguin line with Dutton being a boutique line, publishing approximately 40 books per year. Half of them fiction and the other half non-fiction. About 25% of their releases hits the New York Times bestseller list each year. They had an excellent run in 2012 when four of the books they published hit the #1 spot on the New York Times bestsellers list: Believing the Lie by Elizabeth George, Stay Close by Harlan Coben, Winter of the World by Ken Follet and the headline-making No Easy Day: The Firsthand Account of the Mission that Killed Osama bin Laden by Mark Owen.
At the moment (2013) their company President and Publisher is Brian Tart, who started at the company in 1998 as Editor in Chief. He was named Publisher in 2005 and just a year later he was President.
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