R.R. Donnelley & Sons Company

2223 South Martin Luther King Drive
Chicago, Illinois 60616
U.S.A.
(312) 326-8000
Fax: (312) 326-8543

Public Company
Incorporated: 1870 as The Lakeside Publishing and Printing Company
Employees: 31,000
Sales: $3.50 billion
Stock Exchanges: New York Pacific

R.R. Donnelley & Sons Company is the largest supplier of commercial printing and allied services in the United States, as well as a major supplier in the United Kingdom. Principal services are presswork and binding. Other businesses of the company include the provision of lists, and production and fulfillment services to direct-mail marketers; design and creative services; and data base management services.

Richard Robert Donnelley, the company founder, who was born in Brantford, Ontario, Canada, in 1836, became an apprentice printer while in grammar school. He was paid full journeyman wages by age 16, made foreman by age 18, and soon afterward, made partner in the printing shop. In 1857 Donnelley traveled with John Hand, a distinguished Canadian typesetter, to New Orleans, Louisiana where he became a jobber for True Delta, a newspaper. He returned to Canada when the Civil War began.

Following his return, he married the woman who would become the matriarch of the business, Naomi Ann Shenstone of Brantford. The following year, in 1864, they moved with their two-month-old child to Chicago to accept a partnership in the printing and publishing firm of Church, Goodman, and Donnelley, which specialized in the educational, religious, and historical fields. The printing firm became one of the major book- and journal-publishing houses of its day.

The partnership of Church, Goodman, and Donnelley incorporated as The Lakeside Publishing and Printing Company in 1870 to expand its printing operation. The Great Chicago Fire of 1871 destroyed all Richard Donnelley’s assets, including the new Lakeside Building, which was then under construction. Following a trip to New York to arrange financing and equipment in order to reopen, Donnelley returned to Chicago to set up shop under the name of R.R. Donnelley, Steam Printer, which merged with Lakeside in 1873. At this time he and his partners were faced not only with a decline in commercial printing but also with a widespread depression. Donnelley attempted to diversify, forming a subsidiary, Williams, Donnelley and Company, to publish the Edwards Chicago City Directory. In 1875, a new subsidiary, Donnelley, Loyd & Company, published a successful series of classic reprints called the Lakeside Library. In 1877 as competition stiffened, the 200-title Lakeside Library was sold.

When these and other attempts failed to salvage the publishing business, Lakeside closed. Donnelley, Loyd & Company acquired the printing equipment of The Lakeside Publishing and Printing Company in 1877. In 1878 Norman T. Gassette became a partner in Donnelley, Loyd & Company, then known as Donnelley, Gassette & Loyd. Richard Donnelley created a separate corporate entity in 1880 to house the publishing side of the enterprise, the Chicago Directory Company. In 1882 the Donnelley, Gassette & Loyd directors voted to change the name of their printing firm to R.R. Donnelley & Sons Company. Richard Robert Donnelley died in April 1899, at the close of the company’s most successful decade; the firm passed into managerial control of his sons, with Thomas Elliot Donnelley becoming president and Reuben H. Donnelley heavily involved in the directory business.

During the difficult start-up years it had been Naomi Donnelley whose strong entrepreneurial spirit and determination to keep the presses working led her to write cookbooks in addition to her general bookkeeping duties in the operation. From the time of the reconstruction of the firm after the fire through the turn of the century, the client base for commercial printing jobs expanded. R.R. Donnelley produced hardbound catalogs for the Studebaker Wagon Company and Benjamin Allen & Company; yearbooks for The Chicago Club, The Chicago Athletic Association, and The University Club; bicycle catalogs for Gormully & Jeffrey and Mead Cycle Company; and directories for the Chicago Directory Company and Lord & Thomas; and circulars for Marshall Field & Company, Mandel Brothers, and Chas. A. Stevens & Co., In addition, the company provided printing services to Link-Belt, Deering Harvester Company, Lyon & Healy, and Western Electric. In 1886, ten years after the telephone patent was issued, Donnelley took on the directories for Illinois Bell Telephone Company.

In 1895 the first sewing machine, used for binding, was introduced into the company, and at about the same period, the Empire and Linotype machines were installed, as the company raced to compete in the age of machine composition. In 1898 the company installed its first rotary perfector press with the ability to fold. Book sets and general list books continued to be a mainstay of the company. The printers produced high-quality work for distinguished book publishers, including Stone and Kimball, a contract that developed into a commitment to produce 48 titles. In 1901 the case bindery was introduced, and in 1902 the first Monotype machine, allowing the firm to attempt to keep pace with innovations abroad, although the quality of U.S.-made typefaces and ink did not match those produced by the British or Germans.

In keeping with its tradition of printing book sets and reprinting classics, Thomas Elliot Donnelley introduced the Lakeside Classic series in 1903, to illustrate the company’s ideals of the well-designed book, a much-debated topic in trade journals in the United States and United Kingdom and to serve as an annual keepsake for employees, designed to bolster morale and company loyalty. In addition, 1903 was a period of great turbulence among the ranks of unionized printers; Donnelley resisted the disruptions and ended its participation in a closed shop. By 1907 the firm severed all ties with the printing unions, which were at the time leaders in apprenticeship programs and industrial education opportunities. As a consequence of its intention to maintain an open shop, the firm introduced an unusual system of in-house education with both an apprenticeship program and a baccalaureate degree in economics and cultural studies from the University of Chicago. The University of Cincinnati also participated. The school was called the Lakeside Apprenticeship School, and it flourished for more than two decades.

The importance placed on an open shop environment where educated employees could work for a lifetime, experiencing both challenge and promotions, led to other innovations. First was the establishment of the Memorial Library in the Chicago plant, where an apprentice or experienced printer could come to see examples of the finest contemporary printing accomplished throughout the world, and also see examples of the best book production achieved by R.R. Donnelley & Sons. In addition, adjoining the library, the company installed gallery and exhibition space that rivaled the gallery space at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. Exhibits of fine printing were designed for the benefit of employees, but open also to the general public. The firm also established a five-man design and typography department in the early 1920s, headed by an able typographer and commercial printer, William Kittredge. At the same time, an extra binding department was established. The value placed upon integrating design with production was a gradual development that emerged from the founding of the apprenticeship school and the Memorial Library.

In 1916 the Chicago Directory Company was renamed the Reuben H. Donnelley Corporation, with R.H. Donnelley as president and T.E. Donnelley as vice president. Following his brother’s death in 1929, Thomas assumed the presidency of the publishing division while continuing as president of R.R. Donnelley & Sons Company, and thereafter, the printing and publishing businesses, while maintained in separate divisions, were incorporated within one operating company. Naomi Donnelley continued to be an active force in the firm, and in 1924 on the occasion of firm’s 60th anniversary, delivered a speech to the assembled company about the history of the enterprise.

Among the firm’s competitive publicity ventures launched during this time by William Kittredge was the Four U.S. Books Campaign, begun in 1926 and completed in 1929, several weeks before the Wall Street stock market crash. The campaign, which was to feature only the work of U.S. authors—such as Herman Melville, Edgar Allan Poe, and Henry David Thoreau—was intended to promote the U.S. printing industry, using only ink, typefaces, paper, and other materials produced in the United States. Further, the books were to be illustrated by leading U.S. commercial artists of the day, Rockwell Kent, William Dwiggins, Rudolph Ruzicka, and Edward Wilson. As it turned out, all the physical properties except the labor by craftsmen-graduates of the Lakeside Apprenticeship School had to be imported. The major purpose of the Four Books Campaign was to reposition Donnelley with the changing mass-market book publishing industry, and to allow it to compete with the Book-of-The Month-Club and the Limited Editions Club, among others. Although the technological point may have been missed, the company successfully repositioned itself with the book-publishing industry, and acquired significant new book-club business as a result.

The firm received a magazine-publishing contract from Henry R. Luce in 1927 to print Time, and later Life, a working relationship that continues in the 1990s. The 1920s and 1930s were a time of tremendous technical advances in the printing and allied industries, and Donnelley continued to keep pace, introducing Deeptone processing and sheet-fed gravure presses. These innovations served to advance the look of the product and the rate of production in the plant.

In 1952 General Charles C. Haffner Jr. succeeded his father-in-law, T.E. Donnelley, as chairman of the board of the R.R. Donnelley & Sons Company. In 1964 Gaylord Donnelley was elected chairman of the board, retiring in 1975, when he was succeeded by Charles W. Lake Jr., the first person outside the Donnelley family to serve as chairman of the board. Lake was succeeded by John B. Schwemm in 1983, who was named president, and in 1989 John R. Walter, succeeded Schwemm as chief executive officer. James R. Donnelley, the great-grandson of R.R. Donnelley, in the early 1990s was vice chairman.

The company made its first public stock offering in 1956. Several major acquisitions came in the next few decades. The company formed its Lancaster, Pennsylvania, manufacturing division after acquiring the Rudisill Printing Company in 1959. In 1961 Donnelley sold the Reuben H. Donnelley Corporation to The Dun & Bradstreet Corporation. In 1978, Donnelley bought Interweb, a printing firm since reorganized as the Los Angeles division of Donnelley, and Ben Johnson & Company Ltd. of York, England, another printer. In 1986 Donnelley acquired Norwest Publishing, a printer of telephone directories, and CSA Press, a printer of computer documentation. The company bought Metromail Corporation, a provider of lists and list enhancement services to direct mail marketers, in 1987.

The product mix of R.R. Donnelley & Sons has diversified since the mid-20th century. The company’s presence has expanded globally, with more than 100 offices in the United States, and international subsidiaries in the United Kingdom and Japan. The company is organized into nine product groups: books; magazines; catalogs; telecommunications; financial-printing services; documentation services, including software and magnetic media products; information services; international, including operations in the United Kingdom and the Far East; and Metromail, which markets targeted lists, data bases, and inserting services. Catalogs still make up the largest segment of Donnelley’s printing business, as has been the case for most of the company’s history. The second-largest segment of its business is magazines; third, directories; fourth, books; fifth, documentation services.

In December 1989 R.R. Donnelley & Sons Company announced that it was negotiating to acquire Meredith/Burda Companies, jointly owned by the Meredith Corporation of Des Moines, Iowa—a leading U.S. publishing company—and by Franz and Frieder Burda of Germany, for about $500 million. Meredith/Burda’s 1989 sales were $456 million, with six plants and more than 3,000 employees in 1989. The transaction went before the Federal Trade Commission early in 1990, which explored the antitrust implications of such a merger. The acquisition was completed in September 1990. Already the largest printer in North America, the merger solidifies Donnelley’s position globally.

Principal Subsidiaries

Ben Johnson and Company Limited (U.K.); R.R. Donnelley Far East, Limited (Japan); Dowa Insatsu K.K. (Japan); Mobium Corporation for Design and Communication; Metromail Corporation; Donnelley Caribbean Graphics, Inc. (Barbados); Irish Printers (Holdings) Limited (Republic of Ireland); R.R. Donnelley (U.K.) Limited; Impresora Donneco Internacional, S.A. de C.V. (Mexico); Northwest Publishing Co.

Further Reading

Donnelley, Gaylord, “Donnelley History,” The Printer, Spring 1965, Summer 1965, Fall 1965, Winter 1965, Spring 1966, Summer 1966, Fall 1966, Winter 1966, Spring 1967, Summer 1967, Fall 1967; The Printer, Fall 1989; Badaracco, Claire, American Culture and the Marketplace: R.R. Donnelley’s Four American Books Campaign at the Lakeside Press, 1926-1930, Washington, D.C., Library of Congress, Center for the Book, 1990.

—Claire Badaracco