Thomas Nelson founded company in Edinburgh in 1798, originally as a second-hand religious bookshop; soon diversified into publishing reprints of Puritan writers, going on to become a publisher of new books; as the nineteenth century went on it produced an increasingly wide range of non-religious materials; established American publishing arm in New York in 1854; until 1968 it specialized in producing popular literature, children's books, Bibles, religious works, psychological tests and educational texts; acquired by Wolters Kluwer in 2000, becoming part of the educational imprint Nelson Thornes.