Samuel Austin Allibone (April 17, 1816 – September 2, 1889) was an American author, editor, and bibliographer. Biography Samuel Austin Allibone was born in 1816 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, a descendant of French Huguenots and Quakers, and there he was privately educated. There for many years he struggled to succeed as a merchant, but commercial success eluded him. He eventually abandoned business to devote himself to the books he loved, accumulating a vast knowledge of English literature from his extensive reading and bibliographical researches. In 1865, he was elected as a member to the American Philosophical Society. His most significant work is A Critical Dictionary of English Literature and British and American Authors. Allibone registered his copyright for the work in 1854. As it happened, George William Childs of the publishing firm Childs & Peterson maintained offices at 602 Arch Street in Philadelphia, just a short walk from Allibone’s residence in the 900 block of Arch Street. In 1855, Childs printed a specimen of Allibone’s book for reviewers. This preview presented entries only for the first three letters. Not until 1858 did Childs & Peterson register its successor copyright and publish the first volume of Allibone’s Critical Dictionary, containing entries from A through J. In 1859, the Critical Dictionary was jointly published with the London firm of N. Trübner & Co., but the book was printed by Deacon & Peterson in Philadelphia. The firm of Childs & Peterson dissolved in 1860, and Childs then joined with the Philadelphia publisher Joshua Lippincott for several months. In 1861 he re-established himself as a publisher under his own name, and the next sighting of the Critical Dictionary is Childs's 1863 reprint of the first Childs & Peterson edition of 1858. However, Childs retired from the book trade that year, and in 1864 he purchased the Public Ledger, a Philadelphia newspaper. Facilitated by Childs's friendship with both Allibone and Lippincott, the copyright in the Critical Dictionary passed to Joshua B. Lippincott in 1870. In quick succession the whole of Allibone’s Critical Dictionary then appeared: volume 1 in 1870, expanded to encompass A through L; also in 1870 volume 2 for M through S; and finally volume 3 in 1871, with the “forty indexes of subjects” that had been promised on the title page of each printing since 1858. Childs would later recall that he and Lippincott had together invested more than $60,000 to publish the