Short answers, pulled from the story.
The Bobbs-Merrill Company traces its origins to the 3rd of October 1850, when Samuel Merrill purchased an Indianapolis bookstore and entered the publishing business. The company operated under several names before adopting the Bobbs-Merrill name in 1903, after long-time director William Conrad Bobbs.
Bobbs-Merrill Co. v. Straus, 210 U.S. 339 (1908), is regarded as the origin of copyright's first-sale doctrine. The ruling established that once a copyright holder sells a copy of a work, they cannot control what the buyer subsequently does with that specific copy.
Bobbs-Merrill published works by Ayn Rand, Erving Goffman, Richard Halliburton, David Markson, Walter Dean Myers, Mary Roberts Rinehart, James Whitcomb Riley, Irma S. Rombauer, and the early fantasy works of L. Frank Baum. Rombauer's The Joy of Cooking and Rinehart's The Circular Staircase (1908) were among the firm's notable titles.
Bobbs-Merrill published The Wizard of Oz and twenty-seven titles in the Raggedy Ann series. In 1944, the company commissioned artist Evelyn Copelman to illustrate a new edition; those illustrations appeared in 1949 and drew more from the 1939 MGM film than from W. W. Denslow's original 1900 illustrations.
The Bobbs-Merrill name ceased being used in 1985, when Macmillan acquired the Howard W. Sams Company, which had purchased Bobbs-Merrill in 1959. The Fifth Revision of The Joy of Cooking continued to be sold under the Bobbs-Merrill imprint as an exception after the name was otherwise retired.
For much of its history, Bobbs-Merrill was responsible for publishing the codified state laws of Indiana and other U.S. states. The firm also published legal textbooks, and its Notable American Trials series was among its notable legal imprints.