Abingdon Press

Abingdon Press is the book-publishing arm of the United Methodist Publishing House, which traces itself to the Methodist Book Concern, founded at Philadelphia in 1789 on a borrowed six hundred dollars under its first steward, John Dickins. It was the first denominational publishing enterprise in the United States and remains the oldest continuous agency of the church that owns it.¹ The Abingdon name itself is taken from Abingdon, Maryland, home of the Methodist Cokesbury College, and came into use at the Book Concern's New York office in the early 1900s; no source consulted gives the exact year, which is why no founding date is recorded here. After the northern and southern branches of Methodism reunited in 1939 the combined house published from Nashville as Abingdon-Cokesbury, reverting to Abingdon Press in 1954 with Cokesbury kept on as the retail arm.² For this catalogue Abingdon is the house behind The New Interpreter's Bible, the twelve-volume commentary it published between 1994 and 2002, with a separate general index following in 2004.³