One of the older privately owned independent publishers in the country, The Shoe String Press has undergone many transformations in its more than 50 years of existence.

The Shoe String Press was founded in 1952 by an associate librarian at Yale University and his wife. They began reprinting scholarly books for academic libraries to help fill the gaps in collections that existed in large part due to the dearth of publishing during World War II. They were so successful that, in partnership with a rare book librarian, they incorporated the Press in 1958.

Throughout the sixties, Shoe String was a major reprint house but began publishing its own titles as well, in the humanities and reference, and in library science. In the seventies, the company had expanded from the college into the public library market, and in 1980 a new family of owners took over.

Under their leadership, the Press inaugurated a library imprint, and began to publish children’s books under the Linnet Books imprint. No longer a reprint house, Shoe String was known for its serious and scholarly original titles in the humanities and military studies and its celebrated literary reference series under the Archon Books imprint.

By the early nineties, the Press was increasingly child- and education-oriented. Today it seeks to publish books that give young readers a rich and satisfying context for understanding the world around them: books that will help kids make sense of things without telling them what to think.

To the adults who work with children -- teachers, librarians, youth group leaders, camp counselors -- the Press tries to give great content with user-friendly appeal, written by experienced (in the trenches) practitioners, who have high standards and who do not take the easy way out. We recognize that the professionals who use our books are likely to be stretched thin: if they can find in Linnet Professional Publications new ideas and ways of doing things that will work, then we are doing our job.

Our present and future

The Shoe String Press today publishes twelve to fifteen nonfiction titles each calendar year, most of them under its two Linnet imprints. Most are hardcover (cloth); a few are split editions (cloth and paper); and occasionally we publish in trade paperback only. The company is editorially driven and each book is treated as a separate entity in all respects -- editorial, design, production, and marketing.

Editorially we are interested in books for children and those who work with them: folktales and folklore; first-person historical narratives and/or oral histories and other primary source materials; books about significant events as microcosms of historical or cultural influences; science (including natural history) as an expression of culture; children’s material culture; in-depth background resources to the study of certain key genres or texts; and on and on. We like books that are interdisciplinary, multicultural or multiethnic, that are solid works of research, scholarship, and understanding. This editorial ethic is a direct outgrowth of our past as publisher of scholarly books in the humanities at the college level.

Our Reference Series, while originally conceived for the college market, have generalized to public and high school libraries as well. Supplements or volumes in each series follows an established format and are published on a more or less regular schedule as conditions make possible.

At present, publishing of serious and scholarly individual titles in the humanities, under the Archon imprint, has been suspended.

Our main market is the education market, either in school or public libraries, or in books for classroom use. We mail one children’s catalog early each year, to cover the year’s new titles and backlist books. Our books are available through major wholesalers and major retailers, both brick-and-mortar and online. We attend conferences and exhibits, send out review copies of books to appropriate media, and seek for each book its natural niche in the vast arena of published work.

The principles of sound scholarship and high standards of manufacture that guided the Press at its inception in 1952 still hold today. The Shoe String Press continues to provide nonfiction books to ignite the imagination, and enrich the knowledge, of readers wherever they may be.