Baruch ben Yosef Romm founded the business originally in Grodno and it continued there for some decades at the same time that its primary operations moved to Vilnius in 1799.
[1] Controversy had arisen when the Shapira family of Slavuta intended to publish a new edition of the Talmud in line with an Hasidic point of view.
In 1835, located as they were in Vilnius, which was the heart of misnagdic Lite, the Romms caused a stir by publishing the Hasidic Talmud.
From then until 1940 (when it was nationalized by the Soviet government), the Romms published material from the diversity of Litvak Jewish religious opinion and practice.
[1] The Romm factory burned down in 1840, but was soon rebuilt, and prospered through both its monopolistic privileges and the rapidly increasing Jewish population of the region.
As The Widow Romm, she was known internationally by Hebrew and Yiddish scholars and general readers in Eastern Europe and elsewhere, giving her an unusual stature for Litvak women of her time.
On February 4, 1990, professor Herman Branover presented the Lubavitcher Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson with a Russian-language translation of the Jewish Hasidic text, the Tanya, which had been recently printed, in the quantity of 20,000 units, in the facilities of the Romm publishing house in Vilna.