Silver Burdett & Ginn

Silver Burdett first formed as a company in 1888 when Frank W. Burdett purchased a controlling interest in the textbook publishing company, Silver & Company. In 1962, it was acquired by Time Inc., and it became the distributor of Time-Life Books to schools and libraries. In 1965 it became the first division of the General Learning Corporation, a multi-million dollar collaboration between Time Inc. and General Electric. Simon & Schuster purchased it in 1986, and merged it with Ginn & Company, a leading el-hi (elementary school and high school) textbook publisher - which formed the imprint Silver Burdett & Ginn. In 1998, Pearson PLC acquired Simon & Schuster's educational businesses (which included Silver Burdett & Ginn) from Simon & Schuster's parent Viacom, and created Pearson Education.

Pearson closed Silver Burdett in 1999. The Silver Burdett Ginn name persisted for some time as Silver Burdett Ginn Religion, a Catholic publishing division operated under Scott Foresman before it was sold to RCL Benziger in 2007 (which also acquired Benziger from McGraw-Hill in the same year). The trademark registration for Silver Burdett Ginn was transferred to Savvas Learning Company after Pearson sold its US K-12 education division in 2020 and lapsed in 2021.

In 1867, Edwin Ginn founded the publishing company Ginn Brothers in the City of Boston. After a series of brief partnerships and name changes, the firm was finally established under the name Ginn & Company in 1885. By the 1890s, the publisher – which had become particularly known for its school texts – outgrew its Boston location and sought to expand elsewhere. In 1895, the company built a new publishing factory, the Athenaeum Press, in Cambridge. By the late nineteenth century, the Press had an output of ten thousand books per day and was responsible for publishing over 800 titles (Gilman, 1896; Eliot, 1913).