Krause Publications

We are committed to providing our customers with quality products and services that support their interests and meet their needs on a timely basis. We are committed to ensuring Krause Publications' long-term viability by providing a rewarding work environment for its employees and accumulating capital to reinvest in the business. Krause Publications, Inc. an employee-owned enterprise, bills itself as 'the world's largest publisher of hobby periodicals and books.' The company publishes and circulates 53 magazines and newspapers for special-interest enthusiasts, covering a wide variety of hobbies and trades, including antiques, arts and crafts, classic cars, coins and paper currency, comic books, fishing, guns, hunting, knives, sports memorabilia, stamps, and toys. On such topics, Krause has printed over 650 books, adding over 100 titles per year. In addition, it publishes serials on the rural construction trade and manages hobby shows. In 1999, in a partnership arrangement with eBay, it also began publishing the official eBay magazine. Although the company is headquartered in Iola, Wisconsin, the small rural town in which it was founded, its publications are printed at several different sites throughout the country. Krause maintains a very helpful web site that provides extensive information, including up-to-date news releases and job opportunities as well as information about its extensive publications. In the early spring of 1953, Krause rented office space and hired his first employee, a clerk he shared with an insurance agent. Numismatic News , which would remain Krause's sole publication for seven more years, grew to 24 pages in 1954, and began turning a profit. Three years later, just before stopping work as a carpenter, Chet Krause constructed a new office building to house his growing operation. Over the next few years, Krause developed Numismatic News into a very durable serial. He was doing well enough by 1961 that he was able to purchase another serial, Coin Press , from a publisher in New Jersey. Krause renamed it Coins, and in 1962 it first appeared under the new owner's imprimatur. In the next year, Krause hired Clifford Mishler as associate editor of Numismatic News . The young man hailed from Vandalia, Michigan, which, like Iola, was also a small rural town, and like Krause, Mishler was an avid coin collector. He helped Krause expand the publication, which by 1964 had grown to an average issue length of 116 pages. However, just when prospects for greater expansion seemed very good, the company hit a temporary setback. In 1965, inexplicably, interest in coin collecting took a fairly drastic downturn, and the company's sales began to drop. Although it survived and again began a forward surge by 1968, Chet Krause and his associates realized that diversification was needed. Until then, the entire focus of the company had been on coins minted in America. That was soon to change. In 1968, the first move towards diversification came when Krause and his staff decided to add book publication and world coins to the company's initial focus on U.S. coins. The result was the 1972 publication of the first edition of the Standard Catalog of World Coins, a cornerstone in Krause's book division. By then the company had already begun diversifying. In the fall of 1971, it had begun issuing a monthly tabloid called Old Cars and was considering other hobbies and interests suited to coverage in serials and books. The physical expansion of Krause and the growth of its staff through both the 1970s and 1980s pretty much kept pace with its ever-increasing product line. Once committed to the idea that diversification was necessary to provide a solid buffer against the volatile interest swings of collectors and hobbyists, the company doggedly branched into new interest territories, even some that it suspected, like most fads, would have a limited life. During the same period, in addition to venturing into new fields with serials ini