Alfred Smith Barnes

American publisher and philanthropist (1817–1888)
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Alfred Smith Barnes (January 28, 1817 – February 17, 1888) was an American publisher and philanthropist.

Barnes was born in New Haven, Connecticut, to Eli Barnes of Southington, Connecticut, a farmer and innkeeper, who founded the hamlet of "Barnesville", which is now Fair Haven, Connecticut. His mother's maiden name was "Morris", and her family came from Morris Cove, Connecticut. Barnes went to primary school in Wethersfield, Connecticut, but he left when his father died in 1827. At the age of 12, Barnes was placed with an uncle, Deacon Norman Smith, who lived near Hartford, and he was schooled by Prof. Jesse Olney, working on his uncle's farm in the summer.

As a young man, Barnes worked as a clerk in a shoe store, then for D. F. Robinson & Co., a publisher in Hartford, where he learned the publishing trade. While in Hartford, he successfully published books aimed at the educational market by Charles Davies on mathematics and Emma Willard on history, in a joint venture between the three of them. Barnes then moved to Philadelphia in 1840, where for four years he built a publishing company, which he then transferred to New York City. After passing through a number of partners and company names, Barnes settled on "A. S. Barnes & Co." in 1865. and a trustee of the Clinton Avenue Congregational Church of Brooklyn, where he lived for many years. He was associated with the Union Pacific Railroad, the New York Elevated Railroad – for which he was a notable proponent – the Hanover Bank, the Dime Savings Bank and the Home Insurance Company. In the 1950s, A. S. Barnes & Company became the major publisher of sports reference books, with groundbreaking books such as The Official Encyclopedia of Baseball by Hy Turkin and S. C. Thompson and Roger Treat's Football Encyclopedia. Both titles represented the first entry in the genre for their respective sports. In 1958, A. S. Barnes was acquired by Thomas Yoseloff, who merged his namesake publishing company into Barnes as an imprint.