George Palmer Putnam was a partner from 1840 with John Wiley in the New York publishing firm Wiley and Putnam. He opened a branch of the firm in London in Paternoster Row, and spent a number of years there, acquiring more than a hundred English titles for the company, and promoting the firm's American titles. On his return to New York he established his own firm, George Palmer Putnam, in 1848. In the 1860s his sons joined the business, which became G. P. Putnam and Son, then G. P. Putnam and Sons, and ultimately, after George Palmer Putnam died in 1872, G. P. Putnam's Sons.
George Haven Putnam, who headed the firm for 58 years, campaigned for an international copyright law, and established the American Publishers' Copyright League. Originally dominated by serious non-fiction, from the 1890s Putnam's lists became more diverse, including many fiction, adventure, and popular non-fiction titles. The firm merged with Minton, Balch and Company in 1930, which brought a range of biographies and juvenile titles to the lists. Capricorn Books, publishing backlist titles in paperback, was introduced in 1955. In 1958 the company attracted publicity when it published Vladimir Nabokov's controversial novel Lolita.
With its purchase of the Berkley Publishing Company in 1966, Putnam acquired a mass-market paperback subsidiary. In 1996 Putnam/Berkley was acquired by Penguin, where it continued to publish under a variety of Putnam imprints.
G. P. Putnam's Sons re-established a branch in London in the 1870s, which was constituted as a private company, G. P. Putnam's Sons Limited, in 1916. Constant Huntington acquired a majority shareholding in 1929-30, when it became Putnam and Company Limited, a major publisher of prestigious British and foreign authors. The firm's editor, Roger Lubbock, bought a controlling interest in 1953, and the firm developed as an aeronautical publisher. It was taken over by the Bodley Head Group in 1962 who sold the aviation titles in 1986 to Conway Maritime Press, where the Putnam imprint continued. From 2005 Conway was part of Anova Books.
