Thomas Nelson is a publishing firm that began in West Bow, Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1798, as the namesake of its founder.

Thomas Nelson Sr. founded the shop that bears his name in Edinburgh in 1798, originally as a second-hand bookshop at 2 West Bow, just off the city's Lawnmarket,[3] recognizing a ready market for inexpensive, standard editions of non-copyright works, which he attempted to satisfy by publishing reprints of classics.

In appreciation, the company funded the stone pillars at the east end of Melville Drive, close to Hope Park.

The First World War led to the temporary rundown of Nelson through the denial of foreign markets, the loss of manpower (including the death of Thomas III), and the general exigencies of wartime, and initiated its long-term decline.

Much of the effort expended during the inter-war period represented merely an attempt to reverse that decline, particularly in expanding the education list and reducing the dependence on reprints.

In 1962, Thomas Nelson and Sons was absorbed into the Thomson Organisation in an effort to sustain its academic and educational publishing interests on a global scale.

Until 1968, according to the curators of a Senate House Library exhibition, the company "specialised in producing popular literature, children's books, bibles, religious works and educational texts.

[citation needed] In a December 1873 article on "Holiday Gifts" the New-York Tribune wrote: Thomas Nelson & Sons, No.

42 Bleecker-st., devote themselves specially to the publications of the Oxford University Press, from which issues a superb variety of Bibles, Prayer-books, and Hymnals.

This, in turn, led the National Council of Churches to grant other publishers licenses for the work, leading to a dramatic fall in revenue for Nelson.

This led to a lawsuit by Gaylord in 2001 over the Word name, and it was settled when Nelson renamed its book division the W Publishing Group.

That year also led to a corporate expansion by the purchase of the Cool Springs and Rutledge Hill Press labels.

In 2006, the private equity firm InterMedia Partners and other investors agreed to buy Thomas Nelson for $473 million.

[14] When Thomson sold Thomas Nelson UK, it kept the Canadian operations of the publisher as part of the company's education division.