Is Your Industry Bible Hiding in Plain Sight?

Here’s a Story of One Company That Created Theirs by Accident

In 1913, three brothers in Cleveland had a business problem: they needed a reason for customers to order more often. Arthur, Leo, and Emanuel Friedman had founded the Chemical Rubber Company a decade earlier, operating out of their father's clothing store. They sold rubber laboratory aprons, then tubing, stoppers, gloves, everything a chemistry department needed to protect itself from itself. They had more than 3,500 high school and college chemistry departments as customers. Business was good, but they wanted it to be better.

Their solution was a 116-page booklet, a compilation of chemical formulas, physical constants, and a periodic table. They called it the Handbook of Chemistry and Physics. They offered it free with the purchase of ten rubber laboratory aprons. It was designed to fit in a pocket. It was an incentive for ordering more of the company’s products. 

What happened next changed the company forever. 

The Book That Escaped the Apron

Within a couple of years the Handbook was selling independently, not because the Friedmans planned for that, but because schools and the scientific community found it genuinely valuable, so much so that they wanted to get additional copies. By 1918 it had grown to 478 pages and had become an indispensable resource. By 1952, it was selling 50,000 copies a year. Generations of scientists came to call it the Rubber Bible.

Linus Pauling, the 1954 Nobel Prize winner in Chemistry, wrote near the end of his life about the summers he spent in his early career poring over its tables of elemental properties. He wasn't the only one. The Handbook had become a formative professional companion for an entire scientific generation.

In 1973, the Chemical Rubber Company renamed itself CRC Press, spun off its manufacturing operations, and formally became a publisher. In reality, it had been a publisher for sixty years. The Handbook had just been waiting for the company to notice. The 105th edition was published in 2024.

But, are Handbooks Dead? 

It's a fair question. Let's Look at the Numbers. The conventional wisdom is that AI and digital platforms are making printed reference works obsolete — that when a practitioner can ask an AI anything and get an instant answer, there's no longer a market for a 2,000-page reference book.

The data is more complicated than that story suggests.

Professional and reference books are under real pressure. That category declined 0.5% in 2024, even as the overall publishing industry grew 4.1% to $32.5 billion. Within scientific and technical publishing, analysts note that books are in decline while digital platforms and online content grow. Those are real trends and shouldn't be dismissed.

But print books overall are proving more resilient than the obituaries suggest. Total print book sales hit 782 million units in 2024, representing 23% growth over the past decade. Print formats have accounted for more than half of all publishing revenue for five consecutive years. The format is under pressure. The need for a definitive, trusted, regularly updated reference is not.

What's changing is where that authority lives. The Handbook of Chemistry and Physics has its own online platform now. CRC's reference content is licensed to institutions digitally. The Rubber Bible didn't die in the digital transition, it migrated.

The Friedmans did not set out to build a publishing institution. They identified knowledge their audience genuinely needed. They organized it well. They committed to keeping it current. And they made it available in a form that served the reader first, the company second.

The return compounded in ways no rubber product ever could. Each edition built on the credibility of the last. Each scientist who trusted the Handbook and found it accurate became an implicit advocate. Each professor who required it introduced an entire cohort of students. After fifty years, and 106 editions, the accumulated authority was impossible to replicate from scratch.

In the beginning, the content of the Rubber Bible was created to support the Friedmans’ business. Over time, the content became the business. And then the content outlasted the original business that created it.

The Question That Matters Right Now

Most organizations with deep domain expertise don't think of themselves as publishers. But if you've been operating in a defined field for any significant period of time, you almost certainly possess what the Friedman brothers curated in 1913: accumulated, specialized knowledge that an identifiable audience uses in their professional practice.

That knowledge lives within your membership. In committees and working groups. In your training programs and certification curricula. In the institutional memory of your practitioners. It isn't scattered across a laboratory. It's scattered across your organization.

And someone in your field needs it consolidated.

Professional associations are in a particularly strong position here. You already have the credibility, the member relationships, and the subject-matter depth to produce a publication that could define the standard of practice in your field. Healthcare organizations, regulatory bodies, specialized professional communities, and companies that have built hard-won expertise serving a niche market are in the same position.

A publication of this kind is not a membership benefit or a conference handout. It's a strategic asset with compounding returns, one that builds earned authority and generates sustainable revenue simultaneously, and one that becomes more defensible with every edition. Whether it lives in print, online, or in some format that doesn't exist yet is a secondary question. The organizations that own the authoritative content will own the platform, whatever the platform turns out to be.

The Handbook That is Needed but Hasn’t been  Written Yet

Somewhere in your industry there is a reference resource that doesn't exist yet — or one that exists in inadequate form, assembled from sources that are inconsistent, dated, and hard to use. There is an audience that would reach for a better version. There is a practitioner who would consult it without thinking.

You may already know what it is. You may have discussed it in a committee and concluded it was too big a project. You may have started it and set it aside. Or you may simply have never considered that the knowledge your organization has spent years accumulating could be organized, published, and sustained in a way that serves your audience and builds your standing for decades.

That's exactly where S4CGV Publishing comes in. S4CGV is a collaboration between S4 Carlisle, one of the most experienced publishing services firms in the country, and The Grandview Group, which brings more than two decades of stakeholder engagement and market research across healthcare, education, and professional associations. Together, we help organizations identify the content their field is waiting for, build it with the rigor it deserves, and sustain it in a way that compounds in value over time.

Is there an industry Bible hiding in plain sight in your organization? We'd like to help you find it.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

David Brake has spent 25+ years helping organizations make consequential decisions by bringing customers or constituents into the process. As CEO of The Grandview Group, he built a business around stakeholder engagement, helping healthcare organizations, school districts, professional associations, government entities, and publishers convert market insight into products that make a difference. That expertise became the driving methodology behind OPTICS for Healthcare, an AI-first platform he co-founded to address workplace violence. The same methodology powers S4CGV, a collaboration with S4Carlisle to help clients develop content that connects with their target audiences.