Publisher:Wonder Books

This page is the wiki-page for the publisher or imprint Wonder Books. This page may be used for extended notes about the publisher, including alternate names, changes of ownership, associated imprints, locations, etc. The link above leads to the ISFDB publisher record for Wonder Books. To discuss what should go on this page, use the talk page. For more on this and other header templates, see Header templates.

This page is the wiki-page for the publisher or imprint Wonder Books. This page may be used for extended notes about the publisher, including alternate names, changes of ownership, associated imprints, locations, etc. The link above leads to the ISFDB publisher record for Wonder Books. To discuss what should go on this page, use the talk page. For more on this and other header templates, see Header templates.

Wonder Books began publishing in 1946 (or possibly slightly before). They were originally owned by Random House. In 1949, they began using Curtis Publishing Company for their distribution services. In 1953, Wonder Books was acquired by a joint venture company comprised of Curtis and Grosset & Dunlap. (Hence some early Wonder Books are reprints of Grosset & Dunlap titles.) They published books up until 1977, when Curtis Publishing shut down and its assets were sold to Kent State University. In 1981, Curtis Management Group was founded to "license publicity rights", and apparently to license remaining copyrights. Reprints were published, especially by Price/Stern/Sloan, until 1986.

Wonder Books focused on young readers, and published several series at various early reader levels. These series include "Wonder Books", "How and Why Wonder Books", "Little Wonder Books", "Wonder Book Easy Reader", "Wonder Starters", "Young Readers Wonder Books", "To Read Aloud", and possibly some others. The only series with very many books of interest to us is the primary "Wonder Books" series. This series began with #501, and the last book published was #896, although the penultimate book in the series appears to be #871. At this time there does not seem to be a good list online of the books in this series so, for the possible convenience of other children's book fans, we include the full list (so far as we know it) here. This complete list is also useful for identifying the likely print dates of various editions. These books often listed only the copyright dates, so for later printings (as revealed by the list of available books in most of these books) and for reprint editions (with a change in the book number), the copyright dates on these other books in the series are necessary. We have been unable to locate any data for the numbers 503, 658, 670, 671, 801, 806, 809, 813, 814, 856, 861, 863, 864, 870. Some of these, especially the later numbers, may have been planned and never published. The full list of books, with copyright dates and reprintings listed (when known) is shown below. Books that might be speculative fiction, and hence could be included in this database, are shown with a * after the number. Those books that are currently included in the database are shown with a **.