Frank Howard Dodd was born on April 12, 1844 at Bloomfield, New Jersey. He was the son of Moses Woodruff and Rachel (Hoe) Dodd. His mother was a member of the Hoe family, long active in the manufacture of printing-presses. His father had been associated with John S. Taylor in publishing religious and theological works at Brick Church Chapel, City Hall Square, New York City.
Dodd graduated from the Bloomfield Academy (at the age of fifteen).
Dodd joined his father in the publishing enterprise, served a ten years’ apprenticeship, and in 1870 succeeded to the control of the house, later taking as partners Edward S. Mead, who died in 1894, and B. Van Wagenen, who retired in 1909. The new firm entered the field of popular fiction, bringing out several books that reached a high rank among the “best sellers” of their time. The first pronounced success in that capacity was E. P. Roe’s Barriers Burned Away, a story deriving its chief incidents from the Chicago fire in Other popular stories by the same author followed. A score of years passed before the firm published anything comparable in financial returns with the Roe books, although its lists contained many titles of superior literary merit. In 1894, Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush, by Ian Maclaren (Dr. John Watson), was brought out in America by Dodd, Mead & Company, and at once achieved a remarkably large sale. Another profitable venture of the house was Paul Leicester Ford’s Janice Meredith (1899).
In the late nineties Dodd and his associates were instrumental in founding and maintaining The Bookman, a literary monthly of high quality. In this undertaking they were greatly aided by the cooperation of the London Bookman. Dodd at that time formed lasting friendships with several British authors and publishers, among others William Robertson Nicoll and Miss Beatrice Harraden. With the opening of the twentieth century he began to make definite plans for a reference book that should provide for American readers what the German public was then getting from the compilations of Brockhaus and Meyer. The result of his carefully developed project was the New International Encyclopaedia (1902 - 04), a work that met with favor because of the convenient arrangement of its material and the compact form of its articles. In 1907 the New International Year Book was begun. This annual publication supplemented the information given in the Encyclopaedia and contained much special material in chronicle form.
Before his death the founder saw most of the second edition of the Encyclopaedia (1914 - 17) and eight successive issues of the Year Book off the press.
Dodd's wife, whom he married in 1868, was Martha Bliss Parker, daughter of President Joel Parker of Union Theological Seminary. He had a son Edward.
