Founded by Samuel Merrill, Sr. in 1850, what was initially a bookstore gradually expanded into a publishing house under his son, Samuel Merrill, Jr., and subsequent partners following the Civil War. The name went through several permutations: Merrill, Meigs, and Company; the Bowen-Merrill Company; and finally Bobbs-Merrill, named in part after director William Conrad Bobbs, in 1903. Bobbs-Merrill published works of many significant authors, including James Whitcomb Riley, Ayn Rand, Irving Bacheller, John Erskine, Ring Lardner, and L. Frank Baum. The company's vast array of publishing topics included regional literature, international publishing, cooking and etiquette, travel, business, law, children's literature, and the history of literary criticism. Bobbs-Merrill was purchased by the Howard W. Sams Company in 1959, which was in turn acquired by Macmillan in 1985.