Macmillan Publishers

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Macmillan Publishers Ltd, also known as The Macmillan Group, is a privately-held international publishing company owned by Georg von Holtzbrinck Publishing Group. It has offices in 41 countries worldwide and operates in more than thirty others.

[edit] History

Macmillan was founded in 1843 by Daniel and Alexander Macmillan, two brothers from the Isle of Arran, Scotland. Daniel was the business brain, while Alexander laid the literary foundations, publishing such great authors as Charles Kingsley (1855), Thomas Hughes (1859), Francis Turner Palgrave (1861), Christina Rossetti (1862), Matthew Arnold (1865) and Lewis Carroll (1865). Alfred Tennyson joined the list in 1884, Thomas Hardy in 1886 and Rudyard Kipling in 1890. [1]

As the company evolved, the brothers' vision continued to inspire the publishing of major writers including WB Yeats, Sean O'Casey, John Maynard Keynes, Charles Morgan, Hugh Walpole, Margaret Mitchell, C.P. Snow and Rumer Godden.

Beyond literature, their vision led to the creation of such enduring titles as Nature (1869), the Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (1877) and Palgrave's Dictionary of Political Economy (1899).

After retiring from politics in 1964, former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom Harold Macmillan became chairman of the company. After his death, his grandson Alexander Macmillan, 2nd Earl of Stockton took up the leadership of the publishers.

The company was one of the oldest independent publishing houses until 1995 when a 70% share of the company was bought by German media giant Georg von Holtzbrinck Publishing Group (Verlagsgruppe Georg von Holtzbrinck GmbH). Holtzbrinck purchased the remaining shares in 1999, ending the Macmillan family's ownership of the company.

Macmillan sold its U.S. operations to American owners in 1950, resulting in the creation of an American company Macmillan Publishing. Through its merger with Crowell Collier and other acquisitions, the U.S. publisher became a media giant in its own right, as Macmillan, Inc. It was acquired by the controversial British tycoon Robert Maxwell in 1989 and eventually dismembered in the wake of Maxwell's death (1991) and the subsequent bankruptcy proceedings. The Macmillan name is currently under the auspices of the McGraw-Hill Companies, whose Education unit includes a division called "Macmillan/McGraw-Hill". This unit publishes textbooks and instructional media for the elementary school market and is one of the largest school publishers in the nation. The MacMillan name also survived in America for the encyclopedia division Macmillan Reference USA, an imprint of Thomson Gale.

[edit] Divisions

The company is made up of over 50 different divisions operating in five areas of publishing:

Education publishing including English language teaching (as Macmillan Education)
Academic publishing including reference (as Palgrave Macmillan)
Science, technological and medical publishing (as Nature Publishing Group), including Nature and other journals
Fiction and non-fiction book publishing (as Pan Macmillan), under the imprints Pan Books, Picador, Macmillan New Writing, Papermac, Macmillan, Sidgwick & Jackson, Campbell Books, Boxtree, Channel Four Books and Macmillan Children’s Books
Publishing Services through MPS Technologies [2] offering Content Delivery, Web Analytics, Fulfilment Services and Technology related services as well as distribution and production