The Catholic Register, based in Toronto, has published a background story on Frank Sheed, who was a founder of the publishing house Sheed and Ward, among whose authors was Evelyn Waugh. The story begins:
Born in Australia in 1897, Frank Sheed’s father was a Scottish Presbyterian, his mother an Irish Catholic. Fortunately for the Church, and for English literature, his mother won out and, at 16, Frank declared himself Catholic and never looked back. Sheed’s passion was Catholic polemics — or apologetics as it was then called — and he devoted himself to this pursuit from his late teens until his death at the age of 85. He specialized in conducting street missions on behalf of an organization called the Catholic Evidence Guild. Through the Guild he met another platform firebrand, Maisie Ward, who, Sheed insists, was more eloquent and convincing than he was. They met in 1924, married in 1926, and later that same year founded Sheed and Ward, a publishing house that over the next half century published the leading lights of Catholicism: writers like G.K. Chesterton, Hilaire Belloc, Evelyn Waugh, Christopher Dawson and Ronald Knox.
According to Wikipedia, Sheed and Ward moved their headquarters from London to New York in 1933, which is probably how they came to have published the first US edition of Waugh’s Edmund Campion in 1935. According to Waugh’s Bibliography (ed. RM Davis, et al.) that edition was marked “Printed in Great Britain” and collates with the Longmans UK first edition. Frank and Maisie’s son Wilfred Sheed (1930-2011) made something of a name for himself as a writer of satirical novels and memoirs as well as books on popular music and baseball.
