Street and Smith was a New York City-based publishing company which eventually became one of the most significant dime novel publishers in the nineteenth century. The company, which dominated the field of women's cheap fiction publishing, also went on to specialise in pulp fiction paperback novels and magazines during the early to mid-twentieth century. Among the company's best known magazines was the pulp science fiction magazine Astounding Stories. Additional side publishing ventures included comic books and sporting yearbooks.
Printer Francis Scott Street (1831-1883) and book-keeper Francis Shubael Smith (1819-1887) began their partnership in 1855 when they purchased the The New York Weekly Dispatch. After moving into the dime novel market the company prospered and by the 1880s had become a major force in US publishing. Following the retirement of Francis Smith in 1877, Ormand Gerald Smith (1860-1933) became president, retaining the position well into the twentieth century.
In 1933 Street and Smith acquired Clayton Magazines (which published Astounding Stories). By 1837, however, the company had begun to discontinue publishing a number of its pulp titles, including Top-Notch and Complete Stories. This move towards down-sizing its popular paperback output became a major strategy from 1938 onwards following the succession of Allen L. Grammer as company president (Grammer had previously established a 20 year career as an efficiency expert for Curtis Publishing Co.). By 1949, with book sales declining due to the advent of television, the company had stopped publishing all its pulps and comics, selling off several titles to US competitor Popular Publications.
In 1959 Street and Smith was bought out by Condé Nast Publications. The company was still credited as publisher of a number pre-season sports magazines until 2007 when American City Business Journals (a division of Advance Publications) merged these with its newly acquired magazine The Sporting News (TPN). The Street and Smith name continues to survive, however, as the named publisher of Condé Nast's periodical SportsBusiness Journal.
Among the Australian authors to be published by Street and Smith were
Charles Reade,
Russell W. Clark,
E. W. Hornung and
Guy Boothby.
