Corporate History More than just the recorders of humankind’s achievements, we are active participants in that achievement.
The Chemical Rubber Company In 1900, Arthur Friedman, a student at Case School of Applied Science in Cleveland, Ohio, started a part-time enterprise to produce rubber aprons and sell them to chemistry laboratories. His brothers, Leo and Emanuel, soon joined him to form the Chemical Rubber Company. They published the first edition of the Handbook of Chemistry and Physics in 1913 as a marketing incentive, giving a copy away with each sale of a dozen or more aprons. Designed to fit in the pockets of those aprons, the little book provided chemists with all the essential chemical data they needed.
Filling such an important need, this original single-source reference began to take on a life all of its own. Before long, the Handbook became the standard reference for chemists and physicists worldwide. Updated nearly 90 times, it has grown from its original apron-pocket size to a 2500-page volume that continues to be a mainstay of science and technology. The Rubber Book, as it was known to previous generations of scientists, is now available in an interactive electronic format, available both on CD and the web.
An Immutable Constant Like many other publishers, CRC Press has gone through a number of acquisitions and mergers, but unlike most, both its name and its mission remain intact. Today CRC Press functions as the principal science and technology book division of the Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa Company. In getting to this notable position, more changes have occurred than we can list.
Many of those changes involved bringing specialty publishers under our umbrella in service to the cross-discipline trend that is now the way of all science. A primary example was the acquisition of Lewis Publishers in 1990, which made CRC the leading publisher of environmental science books. The subsequent additions of St. Lucie Press and Auerbach Publishing extended our reach into business management and information technology. The acquisition of Chapman & Hall's mathematics and statistics titles took us to the head of the class in these two fields.
Perhaps the most important change occurred when in 2003, CRC Press became a member of the Taylor & Francis publishing group. No scientific publisher has a more illustrious history than Taylor & Francis. Established in 1783, Taylor & Francis was truly the voice of the European enlightenment. With little more than the power of conviction of a young printer’s apprentice named Richard Taylor, it launched the world leading physics and material science journal, the Philosophical Magazine, which was the first of the more than 1000 journals it now publishes covering nearly every facet of human endeavor.
As if marrying into that lineage wasn’t impressive enough, CRC Press also benefitted from the independent 2004 merger of Taylor and Francis with Informa. While the corporate name Informa came into being only as of 1998, the organization can trace its bloodline back to 1734 when the first issue of the maritime publication Lloyd's List was pinned to the wall of Edward Lloyd's City of London coffee shop. With over 150 offices across the world, Informa plc is the leading international provider of specialist information and services for the academic and scientific, professional, and commercial business communities. Operating in over 40 countries, it produces 10,000 events annually.
Merging the path of CRC Press with that Taylor & Francis and Informa, has expanded the company’s depth as well as its reach. A host of other renowned publishers has come under the CRC banner in recent years. These include Dekker Publishing, the book division of the Institute of Physics, Garland Press, Lawrence Erlbaum, and Haworth. Most recently, Productivity Press joined the line-up. At the forefront of the lean revolution in industry and manufacturing for many years, Productivity Press is now helping to bring the benefit of lean reform to other industries including that of healthcare.
Moving Beyond the Printed Page
CRC Press mirrors nearly all of its new print resources and references as well as much of its backlist with ebook versions. In addition to more traditional volumes, CRC Press also continues to build its online presence through CRCnetBASE, annual and perpetual subscriptions on nearly four dozen online libraries comprising thousands of complete books and dozens of databases.
Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa Company
As one of the world’s largest publishers, Taylor & Francis maintains offices in all parts of the world. With offices in London, Brighton, Basingstoke and Abingdon in the U.K., New York, Philadelphia, and Boca Raton, Fla. in the USA and Singapore and Melbourne in the Pacific Rim, the Taylor & Francis Group publishes more than 1000 journals and around 1,800 new books each year, with a backlist in excess of 20,000 specialist titles.
