Baker & Taylor history

After establishing a solid position in Hartford, the two businessmen moved their flourishing concern to New York City in 1835.

Susie Baker, the daughter of enslaved parents, was born in Liberty County on August 6, 1848.

Edward King died in September 1866, a few months before the birth of their first child.

In 1867 she returned to her native Liberty County to establish another school.

In 1885, exactly 50 years after the relocation from Hartford to New York City, James S. Baker and Nelson Taylor purchased the company founded by Robinson and Barber, lending their surnames to a concern that would bear the Baker & Taylor name for more than the next century.

In terms of business focus, James Baker and Nelson Taylor did not alter the direction of the business they acquired from Robinson and Barber until 1912, when they abandoned publishing entirely and instead directed the company toward wholesaling.

1958: Parents Magazine acquires the company.

1970 Acquisition by W. R. Grace & Co.

Garbacz witnessed the effects of W. R. Grace & Co.'s ownership of Baker & Taylor firsthand, joining the book wholesaler in 1974, four years after its acquisition by the diversified conglomerate.

Baker & Taylor Video's roots extended back to 1975 when Chicago-based Sound Unlimited was founded.

The company, which lengthened its name in 1979 to Sound Video Unlimited, operated as a regional wholesaler of videocassettes.

By 1980, Garbacz had risen to the position of president, a post that provided him with a revealing vantage point from which to evaluate the company's operation under W. R. Grace & Co.

The first of the pair took up residence there in 1983 and was named Baker, because he slept in a Baker & Taylor box.

1986: Baker & Taylor Video, the largest full-line videocassette distributor in the United States is formed.

Then, following the 1989 acquisition of Feffer & Simons, which operated as an international publishers' representative, Baker & Taylor International, Ltd. was formed, providing Baker & Taylor Books with a corporate conduit to extend its wholesaling services to international markets.

For those disenchanted with the manner in which the Baker & Taylor businesses were managed under the auspices of W. R. Grace & Co., welcome news arrived in November 1991 when the diversified conglomerate announced its intention to sell its Baker & Taylor subsidiaries.

As part of these changes, Baker & Taylor's software division, SoftKat, underwent a name change in 1992, becoming Baker & Taylor Software.

1993: Baker & Taylor Entertainment is established as a supplier of videocassettes and music recordings in cassettes and CDs.

In 1996 as online bookselling was becoming more widespread, Baker & Taylor and its main competitor, Ingram Book Co., a unit of Ingram Industries, were creating computer programs that would allow booksellers to link their Web sites to the distributors' extensive database of books.

In November 1998 an announcement came that rocked the book business: Barnes & Noble was planning to buy the biggest book distributor, Ingram Book Group of Nashville, for $600 million.

The January 4, 1999 issue of Mergers & Acquisitions Report predicted that Amazon.com and Borders would bid for privately held Baker & Taylor—the only large competitor to the Ingram Book Group.

In the fall of 2000 the American Booksellers Association launched Booksense.com, the e-commerce wing of the organization's family of independent-bookseller Web sites, using Baker & Taylor's Title Source Database, which at the time contained 2.2. million books.

But like many dot-com disappointments, VarsityBooks was unable to sustain its stock value, and in January 2001 the company was delisted from the NASDAQ.

Butchart, R. E. (2003). Susie King Taylor.

Susie King Taylor, Reminiscences of My Life in Camp: An African American Woman’s Civil War Memoir (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2006).