Arno Press was founded in New York City by Arnold Zohn in 1962. The New York Times Company acquired a 51 percent interest in the company in 1968 (purchasing the remaining 49 percent in 1971), and subsequently focused its operations towards the reprint market. Specialising in collections deemed to be of importance to America and Americans, Arno Press titles cover a wide array of subjects and areas, including history, art, science, medicine, sociology, government, and literature. The books were sold primarily to libraries and other institutions, either as collections or as individual volumes. Among the first of these collections were the series The American Negro, Eyewitness Accounts of the American Revolution, The German Air Force in World War II, Museum of Modern Art Reprints, and the Tate Gallery Publications. By the early 1970s, Arno Press had also become a leader in publishing medical reprints. In 1971, for example, it released a new collection of eighteen historic documents under the series title Physician Travelers.
During the 1970s, Arno Press published on average eighteen to twenty series per year, including three series of The Romantic Tradition in American Literature and another titled Utopian Literature. Other significant series were the New York Times Book Reviews 1896-1968, the New York Times Theatre Reviews 1920-1970, and the New York Times Film Reviews 1913-1968. From the mid-1970s onwards, Arno Press also began specialising in series reprints of mystery, science fiction, mystery, detective thrillers, occult fiction, and movie history, with these sales similarly geared towards the library market.
In 1975, Arno Press and the New York Times bought out Benjamin Blom Inc, a publisher of art, architecture, and theatre titles, and the following year expanded its operations by moving into the general retail market. Although the Dictionary of Literary Biography (Volume 46, 'American Literary Publishing Houses, 1900-1980') indicates that Arno Press was still active in 1986, no details about the company's operations from the early 1980s have yet been located.
Among the Australian-written or inspired titles published by Arno Press are several historically significant works from the 18th and 19th centuries, notably John White's Journal of a Voyage to New South Wales: With Sixty-five Plates of Non Descript Animals, Birds, Lizards, Serpents, Curious Cones of Trees and Other Natural Productions (1780), Fergus Hume's The Mystery of a Hansom Cab (1886), and Anthony Trollope's Lady Anna (1873) and Harry Heathecote of Gangoil: A Tale of Australian Bush Life (1873). Other titles from the Arno Press catalogue include The Last Lemurian: A Westralian Romance (1896) and Guy Boothby's Pharos the Egyptian (1899). Vernon Knowles also had two short-story collections reprinted in the 1970s.
