Lakeside Book Company Buys Bradford & Bigelow, Adding a Book Printer to Its Business

Lakeside Book Company has acquired Bradford & Bigelow, a book printer, according to a deal notice on Publishers Marketplace, published on 2 November 2026.

Most readers never think about who prints the book in their hands. Bradford & Bigelow does that work for three kinds of customer: schools (K-12, meaning kindergarten through the last year of secondary school in the United States), universities, and trade publishers, the houses whose books are sold in bookshops and general stores. Printing is one link in the chain that gets a manuscript onto a shelf, and this deal moves Lakeside closer to owning more of that chain.

Bradford & Bigelow will operate as a division of Lakeside Book Company. Its manufacturing and fulfilment sites, in Newburyport, Massachusetts and Newton, New Hampshire, will keep running with their current teams and management. "Fulfilment" here means picking, packing and dispatching orders once they are printed.

For existing Bradford & Bigelow customers, the stated benefit is a wider menu of options. Lakeside says they will be able to print, store and sell their books through one partner operating across North America, using Lakeside's platform. Customers will also gain access to international manufacturing, custom packaging and kitting through Lakeside's PAKSmart service. Kitting means packing several items together into a single set, such as a book with a gift or a boxed series.

The deal fits a run of moves by Lakeside over the past year. The company bought Baker & Taylor Publisher Services, the retail division of the wholesaler Baker & Taylor. That purchase brought Lakeside approximately 150 distribution clients, according to Publishers Weekly, which reported on 19 August 2026. The same report said Lakeside had signed about 12 new publishers for its distribution business. Distribution is the work of storing, shipping and selling other houses' books, so a publisher can reach stores without building that machinery itself.

Lakeside has also reorganised its own distribution arm. It merged the sales resources of Dover Publications, a publisher it has long owned, into that business, according to Lakeside's own announcement.

Taken together, the purchases put printing, storage, distribution and sales under one roof. For a publisher, that can mean fewer hand-offs between companies. For a reader, the change is invisible unless it affects which titles are in stock or how quickly they arrive. Those effects, if any, will show up over time.

It is worth remembering who does the unglamorous work. Printers, warehouse staff and distributors do not appear on a book's cover, yet every title depends on them. The deal confirms that the people running those plants are staying in place, at least for now.

The announcement did not disclose a purchase price.