Joshua Ballinger Lippincott began publishing in Philadelphia in 1836 and expanded his business after buying a major medical publishing house, Grigg, Elliot and Company, in 1850. During its early years the firm, which was also a bookstore and stationer, specialised in medicine, religion, and textbooks. Literary publishing was expanded with the establishment of Lippincott's Magazine in 1868, which published in each issue a complete novel, often by a prominent English or American author. From this time Lippincott successfully published many reprinted and original novels. With the purchase of Frederick A. Stokes Company in 1941 the firm greatly expanded its range of children's titles.
After nearly 200 years of independent operation, J. B. Lippincott was sold to Harper & Row in 1978 and then to Wolters Kluwer in 1990. Under the ownership of Wolters Kluwer, J. B. Lippincott merged with Raven Publishers, and then with Williams & Wilkins, to form Lippincott Williams & Wilkins in 1998, where it operates as a medical publisher.
