Estes and Lauriat, Boston
Dana Estes and Company

Dana Estes (1840-1909) was a native of Gorham, Maine. He joined the Henry V. Degen and Son book publishing firm in 1859.

He left that company in 1861 to fight in the Civil War and after incurring injuries at Bull Run, Estes returned to Boston in 1862 and worked initially for the house of William H. Hill and Co. Subsequently, he formed a co-partnership with Degen's son, Henry D. Degen.

In 1862-1863 Degen, Estes and (Thurston) Priest was a short lived company. The Degen now was Henry D. Degen, the son of the original Degen. Thereafter there was Degen and Estes in 1864 and 1865 and a Degen, Estes and Co. in 1865-1866. This firm was also noted as a game publisher.

Estes eventually sold his partnership and went to work with Lee and Shepard. In August, 1872 he and Charles Lauriat established Estes and Lauriat.

Charles Lauriat was born in Boston in 1842. He began in the book business at the age of thirteen in the bookstore of William Veazie. Veazie went out of business six years later and Lauriat went to work in the bookstore of William H. Piper and Co.

In 1898 Charles Lauriat left Estes and Lauriat to go into the bookselling business and the ownership of the publishing house went to Dana Estes as Dana Estes & Company.

For more information about this publisher see: "Estes & Lauriat A History 1872-1898" by Raymond Kilgour. Published by The University of Michigan Press 1957.

Here is a picture of the Lauriat book store.

Some ephemera

The books:

Estes and Lauriat between 1872 and 1898 and Dana Estes & Company from 1899 to the teens published numerous juvenile books. Most of the series (libraries) included books that were just put together for convenience and had no relationship to each other. The books in these series are frequently hard to date because there are no advertisements in the volumes and the title pages often have no date. In addition the formats were not changed from year to year.

There are some notable exceptions to the points made just above. These firms are most well known for the three travelogue series as well as the Chatterbox books.

The travelogue series, the ZigZag books, the Knockabout Series and the Three Vassar Girls Series were incredible sellers and are known to this day by most avid collectors of the era. These books generally were released at Xmas time and the date on the title page for the first editions is the year after the copyright page date.

The Chatterbox books which are dated on the covers are discussed elsewhere but they were massively popular collations of stories, poems, pictures, etc for children. Estes and Lauriat was a prolific publisher of various annual books for children.

It is presumed that most all of the juvenile books that these firms published originally had dust jackets. An early example is an 1881 ZigZag book jacket which is shown on the ZigZag page.

Here is a list of the series that are described in this bibliography. I believe it includes all of the juvenile series/sets/libraries published until 1900. A few series are described here which began before 1900 but continued thereafter.