Layton, Utah (founded in Santa Barbara, California) · Est. 1969 · Founded by Gibbs Smith (with wife Catherine)
Gibbs Smith started his publishing company in 1969 with $12,000 earned from a film adaptation of his graduate thesis -- a biography of labor activist Joe Hill that won the Jury Prize at Cannes. He and his wife Catherine moved the whole operation into a converted Utah barn in 1973, sharing office space with the cows. More than 50 years later, Gibbs Smith is still in that barn, still independent, still employee-owned, and still publishing some of the most beautiful home, design, and lifestyle books in the country. Add the one that belongs on your shelf.
Gibbs Smith dreamed of being a history professor. He wrote his master's dissertation on Joe Hill, the American labor martyr, published it as a book, watched Swedish filmmakers turn it into a film that won the Jury Prize at the 1971 Cannes Film Festival, and used the proceeds to start a publishing company with his wife Catherine in a Santa Barbara studio apartment.
By 1973 they had outgrown it. They moved to Layton, Utah, poured everything they had into converting a 1916 family barn into offices, and built one of the most respected independent publishing houses in America -- one where the phones rang alongside the sound of mooing cows, and where every book was chosen because it enriched and inspired, not because it was a safe bet. Today Gibbs Smith is employee-owned, majority women-led, a certified B Corp, carbon neutral, and still operating from that same Utah barn.
The catalog spans home design, interior architecture, cookbooks, and lifestyle titles -- beautifully produced books that belong on a shelf and get pulled down again and again. On a registry, a Gibbs Smith title is a gift with genuine soul behind it: an independent press, a founder who believed books were a calling, and a team still making them in a barn in Utah fifty years later.
