Mysterious Press


Mysterious Press is an American publishing imprint specializing in mystery fiction based in New York City. The company, founded in 1975 by Otto Penzler, has been associated with various companies over the years; since 2011, it has been an imprint at Grove Atlantic. The offices of the Mysterious Press are located within The Mysterious Bookshop in the Tribeca neighborhood. The Mysterious Press imprint is separate from MysteriousPress.com, which is wholly owned by Otto Penzler.

History

Mysterious Press was founded in 1975 by Otto Penzler, and was one of the first genre publishers to use high-quality materials like acid-free paper, full-cloth bindings, and full-color dust jackets, uncommon in a time when such books were often printed as cheaply as possible. In 1989, the company was sold to Warner Books, which was then bought by Hachette in 2005. Penzler, who had since created a new imprint, Otto Penzler Books, at Carroll & Graf Publishers, re-acquired the Mysterious Press name in 2011 and it became an imprint at Grove/Atlantic, Inc., though without publication rights to any of the previous imprint's back titles. Mysterious Press also partnered with Open Road Integrated Media in 2011 for ebooks.
In its earliest days, Mysterious Press published works by Cornell Woolrich, Ross Macdonald, and Isaac Asimov. It went on to publish James Ellroy, Patricia Highsmith, Ruth Rendell, Donald E. Westlake, Kingsley Amis, and Eric Ambler, among many others.