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overview
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overview
This profile deals with the Holtzbrinck publishing group.
It covers -
introduction
The German von Holtzbrinck group competes with Bertelsmann
and Pearson. Like Bertelsmann
it has aggressively expanded into publishing in the US
and UK over the past decade.
The group's history has been distinguished by an emphasis
on quality rather than tabloid publishing, long-term profitability
and considerable autonomy for book and journal publishers.
It has thus been attractive to owners and managers of
valuable brands interested in gaining a financially powerful
parent without surrendering operational independence.
evolution
Founder Georg von Holtzbrinck was born in 1909 and gained
control in 1937 of the Bibliothek der Unterhaltung und
des Wissens, a Stuttgart-based book club founded in 1876.
In 1948 Holtzbrinck rebadged the Bibliothek as the Stuttgarter
Hausbücherei, which became the Deutscher Bücherbund
in 1959.
Holtzbrinck acquired the prestigious Samuel Fischer Verlag
- publisher of Mann, Freud, Ibsen, Fontane and other luminaries
- in 1963. Amid large-scale consolidation within German
publishing - led by Bertelsmann - Holtzbrinck acquired
49% of Kindler Verlag, 26% of Ernst Rowohlt Verlag (with
a dominant stake in printer Clausen & Bosse) and 46%
of Droemer Knaur, three major upmarket hardcover and paperback
publishers. In 1968 it expanded into the periodicals market
by acquiring 50% of the Verlagsgruppe Handelsblatt, centred
on the Dusseldorf-based Handelsblatt business
daily newspaper. In 1970 it took a major stake in the
Saarbrücker Zeitung, forming Verlagsgruppe
Georg von Holtzbrinck as a holding company in 1971 and
gradually increasing its stake in part-owned subsidiaries.
The Handelsblatt merged in 1970 with Industriekurier,
its main competitor and publisher of Wirtschaftswoche,
the weekly business magazine that traced its origins to
the 1926 Der Deutsche Volkswirt. By the end of
the decade Holtzbrinck held 80% of the enlarged Handelsblatt
(with significantly higher circulation) and 100% of Kindler
and Droemer. It acquired the monthly investment magazine
DM in 1977, gaining 25% of the daily Südkurier
newspaper and a 40% stake in Ulm-based printer Franz Spiegel
Buch GmbH.
Holtzbrinck sold its book club operations, under the Deutsche
Büchergemeinschaft badge, to Leo Kirch
for DM250m in 1989. Verlagsgruppe Handelsblatt absorbed
business information database GENIOS in 1986, adopting
a similar path to Pearson's Economist, before
taking control of Swiss economic research institute Prognos
in 1990. In 1986 Holtzbrinck acquired the Scientific
American for $US52.6 million before absorbing US
textbook publisher Worth, W.H. Freeman, Hanley & Belfus
and Henry Holt & Co.
In 1993 it bought Berlin newspaper Tagesspiegel,
acquiring US publisher Farrar, Straus & Giroux in
1994. That year it acquired German business news service
Vereinigte Wirtschaftsdienste (VWD) and Czech publisher
Economia in partnership with Dow Jones.
A year later Holtzbrinck paid DM600 million for 71.1%
of London-based Macmillan, at that time the largest independent
publisher in the UK. The Macmillan acquisition included
US publisher St Martin's Press and subsidiaries in 20
countries, including Australia. Holtzbrinck now controls
all of Macmillan.
Holtzbrinck's investment in German television production
and broadcasting attracted criticism (notably from competitor
Axel Springer); it subsequently
sold its stake in the Sat.1 channel to Kirch and its 14.5%
stake in VOX television to Bertelsmann. During 1995 Holtzbrinck
acquired schoolbook publisher Verlag Moritz Diesterweg,
Swiss publisher Scherz Verlag and the prestigious German
weekly Die Zeit.
The group's New Media arm, established in 1995, has included
minor radio and television production/broadcast operations,
electronic publishers such as Voyager Company and Systhema
Verlag, and minority stakes in internet enterprises such
as Infoseek Germany, Booxtra, Immowelt, Xipolis, and The
Motley Fool Germany. Most were spun off as holtzbrinck
networXs AG in 2000.
In 1998 Holtzbrinck took a minority stake in German publisher
Kiepenheuer & Witsch. A year later Holtzbrinck merged
some of its Droemer publishing arm with Augsburg-based
magazine publisher Weltbild (originally owned by the Roman
Catholic Church and a counterpart to Bayard),
with a 50% stake in the resultant Verlagsgruppe Droemer
Weltbild holding company that included publishing, some
100 Weltbild book stores and a major mail-order database.
During the same year it announced a strategic alliance
with Dow Jones, gaining a 49% stake in the European Wall
Street Journal and Dow taking 22% of Handelsblatt in the
face of growing competition from the Financial Times.
In 2002 it sold its interests in 12 German radio stations
and its 27.8% stake in news channel n-tv to RTL.
The group is family owned and is estimated to have sales
of around US$2.5 billion.
A chronology of the group's development is here.
holdings
An indication of the group's imprints is here.
Macmillan
Macmillan was founded in 1843 by Daniel and Alexander
Macmillan. Apart from publishing Charles Kingsley, Thomas
Hughes, Lewis Carroll, Tennyson, Henry James, Thomas Hardy,
Rudyard Kipling, H.G. Wells, Lewis Namier, WB Yeats and
JM Keynes the Macmillans were responsible for Nature
(launched in 1869), the Grove Dictionary of Music &
Musicians (1877) and Palgrave's Dictionary of Political
Economy (1899).
The major studies are Macmillan: a Publishing Tradition
(Basingstoke: Palgrave 2002) edited by Elizabeth James,
Charles Morgan's The House of Macmillan, 1843-1943,
With An Epilogue (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni Press 1970)
- first published in 1944 and very reverential - and Richard
Davenport-Hines' The Macmillans (London: Heinemann
1992). Insights are offered by Alistair Horne's two volume
official biography of Harold Macmillan, Simon Nowell-Smith's
Letters to Macmillan (London: Macmillan 1967),
George Worth's Macmillan’s Magazine, l859–l907
(Aldershot: Ashgate 2003) and Alan Maclean's No, I
tell a lie, it was the Tuesday : a trudge through the
life and times of Alan Maclean (London: Kyle Cathie
1997).
For Macmillan's US operations see volumes two to four
of John Tebbel's A History of Book Publishing In America
(New York: Oxford Uni Press 1972-81).
Holt and FSG
Henry Holt was established in 1873 by the literateur of
the same name (1840-1926), distinguished for the 1923
autobiographical Garrulities of an Octogenarian Editor.
Henry Holt & Co merged with Rinehart & Winston in 1960
to form Holt Rinehart Winston, acquired by CBS
and then by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich in 1986 before being
purchased by Holtzbrinck in 1987. The imprint's early
history is examined in Ellen Gilbert's The House of
Holt, 1866-1946: An Editorial History (Metuchen:
Scarecrow Press 1993) and Charles Madison's The Owl
Among Colophons: Henry Holt as Publisher and Editor
(New York: Holt Rinehart Winston 1966).
Farrar Straus Giroux (FSG) dates from 1946 when Farrar,
Straus & Company was founded by John Farrar (earlier
the co-founder of Farrar & Rinehart), Roger Straus
III and James Van Alen. Its first list included James
Branch Cabell's There Were Two Pirates and Theodor
Reik's Ritual: Psychoanalytic Studies. Gayelord
Hauser's 1950 Look Younger, Live Longer sold
300,000 copies that year (with another 500,000 during
the following decade) when the house was rebadged as Farrar
Straus & Young, supporting work of more lasting value
such as Edmund Wilson's Classics & Commercials.
In 1951 Farrar acquired Creative Age Press, absorbing
Ariel Books and Pellegrini & Cudahy in 1953, with
Sheila Cudahy becoming a partner and the renamed Farrar,
Straus & Company then becoming Farrar, Straus &
Cudahy in 1955. At that time Robert Giroux (former editor-in-chief
of Harcourt Brace & Co) became editor-in-chief and
vice-president, bringing with him Flannery O'Connor, T
S Eliot and Bernard Malamud.
In 1957 FS&C acquired L. C. Page & Co, buying
McMullen Books, a religious publisher, in 1958 and Noonday
Press in 1960. It was rebadged as Farrar Straus Giroux
in 1964. FSG acquired Octagon Books in 1968 and Hill &
Wang in 1971.
Hill & Wang had been founded by Lawrence Hill (d1988)
and Arthur Wang (1918-2005) in 1956 after their departure
from publisher A A Wyn; Wang was a Wyn editor and Hill
ts sales manager. They bought backlist books from Wyn
and started Dramabooks, with Eric Bentley as adviser,
publishing plays in trade paperback. Hill & Wang authors
included Arthur Kopit, Lanford Wilson, Langston Hughes
and Roland Barthes.
L C Page & Company dated from 1896 when Lewis Coues
Page (d1956) acquired and renamed the Joseph Knight Company.
Page built a profile as a publisher of contemporaries
such as d'Annunzio, the Rudolph Valentino of purple prose,
and classics such as Dickens, Scott, Dumas and Hugo. Publication
of juvenile series such as Lucy Montgomery's Anne
of Green Gables and Eleanor Porter's odious Pollyanna
(the blockbuster of 1913 with sales of over a million
copies) was more profitable. Page was acquired by Farrar,
Straus & Cudahy in 1957. FSG discontinued the L C
Page imprint in 1980.
The group was responsible for initial US publication of
works such as Marguerite Yourcenar's Memoirs of Hadrian,
Robert Lowell's For the Union Dead, John Berryman's
77 Dream Songs, Carlo Levi's Christ Stopped
at Eboli, Shirley Jackson's The Lottery,
Alberto Moravia's The Woman of Rome, Malamud's
The Fixer, John McPhee's Giving Good Weight
and Oscar Hijuelos's The Mambo Kings Play Songs of
Love.
In 1994 Holtzbrinck acquired a controlling interest.
German imprints
The S. Fischer publishing house was founded in 1886 by
Samuel Fischer (1859-1934) and during the Kaiserzeit and
Weimar period was perhaps Germany's most prominent literary
publishing house, responsible for authors such as Ibsen,
the brothers Mann, Hesse and Hauptmann. Aryanisation of
publishing under the Nazis saw Gottfried Bermann Fischer
move to Vienna, with German operations continuing - as
S Fischer - under Peter Suhrkamp. Postwar disagreements
saw a division of the reunited units in 1950, with G B
Fischer gaining S Fischer and Peter Suhrkamp taking some
authors in founding the Suhrkamp publishing house.
There has been no major English-language study of Samuel
or Gottfried Bermann Fischer. Germanists should consult
the latter's autobiography Bedroht - Bewahrt
(Frankfurt am Main: S Fischer 1981) and Peter de Mendelssohn's
outstanding S Fischer und sein Verlag (Frankfurt:
Fischer 1970). There is extensive documentation in 100
Jahre S Fischer, 1886-1986 Das Klassische Program, Ein
Lesebuch (Frankfurt: Fischer 1986) and Almanach
Das Siebzigste Jahr 1886-1956 (Frankfurt: Fischer
1956).
Die Zeit
There has been no major English-language study of Die
Zeit or its founder Gerd Bucerius, a major owner of
the Gruner+Jahr magazine
group now controlled by Bertelsmann.
Ralf Dahrendorf's Liberal & Unabhängig: Gerd Bucerius
und seine Zeit (Munich: Beck 2001) has yet to be translated.
Editor Marion Donhoff's Before the Storm: Memoirs Of
My Youth In Old Prussia (New York: Knopf 1990) is
one of the finer accounts of life before Hitler.
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