Chronicle Books

• 1. Introduction

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  Chronicle Books began in 1967 inside one of America's most storied newspaper families. Phelps Dewey, an executive at Chronicle Publishing Company, the then-publisher of the San Francisco Chronicle, founded the book division that year. He probably could not have guessed that decades later, the company would be producing New York Times Best Sellers about duck-rabbit optical illusions, worst-case survival scenarios, and what your digestive system might be trying to tell you.

  The questions worth asking about Chronicle Books are not just about how it survived. They are about how a regional publisher, rooted in a single city, built a catalog wide enough to include Walt Disney Animation Studios art books, the Griffin and Sabine letter-series, and Star Trek cats. And they are about the family ties and financial gambits that kept it going long after many independent publishers disappeared entirely.

• 2. The Newspaper Bloodline

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  Phelps Dewey founded Chronicle Books as an arm of Chronicle Publishing Company, the parent of the San Francisco Chronicle. That connection to the newspaper world shaped the company's earliest identity and its geography. San Francisco was not just an address; it was a brand.

  The family dimension deepened in 1999. That year, Nion McEvoy purchased Chronicle Books from other family members who were selling off the company's assets. McEvoy was the great-grandson of M. H. de Young, the founder of the Chronicle itself. The transaction was, in a sense, a family member reclaiming a piece of a family legacy from relatives who had chosen to cash out.

  At the moment of that purchase, the company was not small. Staff numbered 130 people, and the house published 300 books per year. Its backlist had grown to more than 1,000 titles. Those figures gave McEvoy something concrete to build on once ownership transferred.

• 3. Building the McEvoy Group

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  One year after buying Chronicle Books, McEvoy created the McEvoy Group as a holding company in 2000. That structure signaled an intention to grow beyond a single imprint.

  The acquisitions followed steadily. Princeton Architectural Press joined the group. In 2008, Chronicle itself acquired Handprint Books. Galison/Mudpuppy, which bundles a stationery and gifts publisher with a maker of puzzles, games, and toys, came aboard in 2012. I See Me!, a publisher of personalized books, was acquired in 2014.

  The group also ventured into magazines. In 2006 the McEvoy Group purchased Spin magazine alongside owners of San Francisco's 7x7 magazine and California Home+Design. That experiment did not last. By 2014, McEvoy had sold off all three magazines. The book and gift side of the portfolio remained the durable core.

• 4. A Catalog Built Wide

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  Chronicle's subject range runs from architecture and art to cooking, gardening, travel, photography, pop culture, and children's books. That breadth was deliberate. A publisher willing to put duck-and-rabbit picture books next to interior design guides and Beatles anthologies is betting on shelf diversity over niche depth.

  The Beatles Anthology is one of the more striking titles in that mix. Nick Bantock's Griffin and Sabine series reached the New York Times Best Sellers list, as did the Worst-Case Scenario series by Joshua Piven and David Borgenicht, the children's series Ivy and Bean by Annie Barrows, and Duck! Rabbit! by Amy Krouse Rosenthal. Barbara M. Joosse's Mama, Do You Love Me won the Golden Kite Award. Me Without You by Lisa Swerling and Ralph Lazar, All My Friends Are Dead, and Mom and Dad Are Palindromes by Mark Shulman filled out a list that ranges from the tender to the darkly comic.

  In March 2006, Chronicle published Between the Bridge and the River, a novel by Craig Ferguson. The Art of... series, running to at least 25 volumes, documents the making of animated films from studios including Walt Disney Animation Studios, Pixar, DreamWorks, and Blue Sky Studios. In 2017 and 2018, the company added Star Trek Cats and Star Trek: The Next Generation Cats by Jey Parks to that eclectic run.

• 5. San Francisco, On Shelves

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  Chronicle Books does not only publish; it also sells. The company operates three retail stores in San Francisco. One sits at the base of its own corporate headquarters, located near AT&T Park.

  The stores sell not just books but gift accessories including desktop calendars, and the company offers custom publishing services as well. Those retail spaces make the company's San Francisco identity literal. Readers do not only encounter Chronicle Books in airport terminals or chain bookstores. They can walk into a shop that sits beneath the company's own offices, in the same city where Phelps Dewey first put the imprint together back in 1967.