The Wiley publishing house was named after its founder, Charles Wiley. In 1807, at the age of 25, he opened a printer’s shop in Manhattan where he started printing and editing law books. In the following decades, the publishing house, by now in the firm grasp of the Wiley family, broadened its spectrum and began publishing American literature and European authors such as Herman Melville, Edgar Allan Poe and Hans Christian Andersen. However, the industrial revolution changed the publishing house’s trajectory and, from the 1860’s onwards, it specialized in science and technology. Other topics such as mechanics, architecture, physics and chemistry have also left their mark on the publishing house’s profile and are still featured to this day. Since adopting this strategy, Wiley has been one of the leading publishers, especially in the fields of natural and social science, with branches in Asia and Europe. It further expanded its scope of activity through the acquisition of several publishers, such as Blackwell Publishing. Modern technology enabled Wiley to develop offers in previously unseen forms such as the `Wiley Online Library´, a wide-ranging platform giving access to magazines, monographs, reference works, articles, audio-visual documents and databases. Several Nobel Prize winners from the fields of literature, medicine, economics, physics and chemistry feature among the 450 authors whose works are published by Wiley and its subcompanies. The publishing house is now based in Hoboken, New Jersey.
