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American News Company

New York City, New York, USA, 1864–1957 (Distributor, Publisher, Printer)

The American News Company was a magazine, newspaper, book, comic book, and postcard distribution company founded in New York City in 1864 by Sinclair Tousey (1818–1887). The company distributed exclusively through its national network of more than three hundred affiliated news agencies and dominated the distribution market in the last quarter of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century. The company closed in 1957. In addition to distributing postcards, the company seems to have published and printed postcards as well and served as an intermediary for the publishing of postcards for smaller publishers. Most of the postcards were printed in Germany before the First World War and thereafter in America and France. The New England News Company was a subsidiary. Among the affiliates of the American News Company during the first two decades of the twentieth century was William Ritchie & Sons, Ltd. of London, England, and Edinburgh, Scotland. That company published artist-signed postcards of watercolors in their "Waterette" series that the American News Company printed using tricolor printing.

American News Company Credit Line
American News Company Credit Line