Okay, so, I wanted to dig into something that’s been bugging me for a while. The question is, “Did Street and Smith go out of business?” You know, they were like one of the oldest publishing houses in America. They did a ton of those cheap books and magazines back in the day, really helped make reading something everyone could get into.
So I started poking around. First, I just wanted to get a basic idea of what happened. I typed “Did Street and Smith go out of business” into my search bar. I was trying to search for what I wanted to know. A bunch of stuff came up, but it was mostly just titles like “The South Western Reporter” and stuff from the National Labor Relations Board. Not exactly what I was looking for. But it did have some words in there like “managed to survive” and I’m thinking, survive what?
I tried a few different searches, added some more words, took some out. Nothing worked. Then it hit me, maybe I should try changing up the question. So I typed in “Street and Smith history” and started to get some interesting hits, which can help me know more about the question I asked at the very first. I’m not sure what I did right or wrong, but finally I got something. There was this bit about how they changed their way of selling magazines and that helped them “survive the panic.” I don’t know, man. I just do what I know.
Then I tried searching for the specific phrase, “managed to survive the panic” related to Street and Smith. Still, the results were all over the place. I got that they were one of the oldest, which is kind of cool, but I was looking for what happened to them. I tried clicking on one of the results, but it was some legal thing. Totally not what I needed. This made me feel so sad. I’m just trying my best but still get no answer.
At this point, I felt like I was just going in circles. I decided to take a break, clear my head. Sometimes you just gotta step away, you know? I tried to think about it like a human. After a while, I came back to it. I started thinking about it from a different angle. Maybe their business model shifted, or they got bought out? I don’t know. I’m not using those hard words.
I changed up my search again, tried to be more specific about the “panic” they survived. Still, nothing concrete about what happened to them as a company, but it is more related to my question than before. Just a lot of info about how they changed things up to stay afloat, which is cool and all, but not what I’m after. So I think maybe I can read into the details of the information I found. I’m still not totally satisfied, but I guess it’s a start.
Here’s what I figured out from all this digging:
- They were a big deal in publishing for a long time.
- They had to change how they did things to survive some kind of “panic.”
My conclusion
I still don’t have a definitive answer about whether they totally went out of business or just changed into something else. I guess the research continues. If any of you guys know more about this, let me know in the comments! It is not easy, but I will keep trying. I hope I can find the answer eventually. Maybe I should try asking someone who knows more about old publishing companies. Anyway, that’s all for now. Hope this was at least a little bit interesting!
