Responsibility • Expertise • Dedication • Relationships

The core values that guide our business practices stem from our sense of responsibility—our responsibility to serve our clients well, our responsibility to maintain high standards of quality and serviceability in the material we produce, and our responsibility to provide a working environment that ensures the wellbeing of our staff.

Simply put, we care—about our relationships both inside and outside the company and about our work product.

Such high-minded statements are easy to declare and meaningless unless they are consistently demonstrated. We stand on our record: a reputation for creating and producing award-winning, user-friendly reference materials over more than forty years, including the most significant publications in the field; a history of cordial working relationships with thousands of international scholars who function as our editorial partners; a tradition of maintaining a dedicated, experienced, and ardent staff fully engaged in their work.

We care, and we prove it every day.

Layman Poupard was founded by Richard Layman and Dennis Poupard, building on the resources of Bruccoli Clark Layman (BCL), a noted reference-resource production company. For over five decades, BCL has specialized in works of literary and social history, including the Dictionary of Literary Biography, American Decades, and American Eras, all of which have earned RASD awards from the American Library Association. Layman, president of BCL, and Poupard, a former executive vice president at Thomson Gale, have more than seventy years combined experience in publishing.