Founder William Heinemann Country of origin United Kingdom | Founded 1890 Parent organization Pearson Education | |
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Parent company Pearson (UK education)
Random House (UK trade)
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (US education) Official website www.pearsonschoolsandfecolleges.co.uk (UK education)
www.randomhouse.co.uk (UK trade)
www.heinemann.com (US education) Headquarters location Portsmouth, New Hampshire, United States | ||
Heinemann is a publishing house that was founded in 1890 in the United Kingdom. Heinemann has published the works of many notable authors including Chinua Achebe, W. Somerset Maugham, J. B. Priestley, and H. G. Wells. The company has also published numerous English translations and significant non-fiction work such as the Loeb Classical Library. After being taken over by Doubleday in 1920, the imprints have had a number of corporate owners. Today, the UK education imprint is owned by Pearson, the UK trade publications are owned by Random House and the US education imprint is owned by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
Contents
History
William Heinemann began working in the publishing industry under Nicolas Trübner, who was a major publisher of what was called Oriental scholarship. When, two years after Trübner's death, his company was taken over by the firm of Kegan Paul, Heinemann left and founded William Heinemann Ltd in Covent Garden, London, in 1890. The first title published was Hall Caine's The Bondman, which was a "stunning success", selling more than 450,000 copies. The company also released a number of works translated into English under the branding of "Heinemann's International Library", edited by Edmund Gosse. In 1893, Sydney Pawling became a partner. They became known for publishing the works of Sarah Grand. The company published the British version of Scribners' Great Education Series under the title Heinemann's Great Education Series, but did not include credits for the original American editor, Nicholas Murray Butler, an omission for which they were criticized.
Between 1895 and 1897, Heinemann was the publisher of William Ernest Henley's periodical New Review. In the late 1890s, Heinemann and the American publisher Frank Doubleday financially supported Joseph Conrad during his initial attempt at writing what eventually became The Rescue, and Heinemann was the British publisher for Conrad's The Nigger of the "Narcissus" in 1897. One of the company's businesses at that time was to sell English books to a Japan that was beginning to be interested in items of Western culture. Heinemann sold to the Japanese bookstore Maruzen translations of the works of Dostoyevsky and 5000 copies of Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution by Peter Kropotkin. In 1912, the company began publishing the Loeb Classical Library series, publications of ancient works with the Greek or Latin text on the left-hand page, and a literal translation on the right hand page. The series has been called "the most significant" of the parallel-text translations. Since 1934, it has been co-published with Harvard University.
On Heinemann's death in 1920 a majority stake was purchased by U.S. publisher Doubleday, with Theodore Byard, who had previously been a professional singer, joining to lead the offices.
A subsidiary company was established in The Hague in 1953; originally intended to distribute works in English to continental Europe, it eventually began to directly print Heinemann's books as well.
The company was later acquired by conglomerate Thomas Tilling in 1961. When the impending takeover became known, Graham Greene (who had been with Heinemann since his first work in 1929) led a number of Heinemann authors who protested by taking their works to other publishers, including The Bodley Head, of which Greene was a director.
BTR bought Thomas Tilling in 1983, and were not interested in its publishing division, so Heinemann was put on the block. Heinemann was purchased by the Octopus Publishing Group in 1985; Octopus was purchased by Reed International (now Reed Elsevier) in 1987. Random House bought Heinemann's trade publishing (now named William Heinemann) in 1997. Heinemann's educational unit became part of Harcourt Education when Reed Elsevier purchased the company in 2001. Pearson purchased the UK, South African, Australian and New Zealand arms of Harcourt Education in May 2007, while Houghton Mifflin purchased the American operations a few months later.
In 1957, Heinemann Educational Books created the African Writers Series, spearheaded by Alan Hill and West Africa specialist Van Milne, which focused on publishing the writers of Africa like Chinua Achebe. Heinemann was awarded the 1992 Worldaware Award for Social Progress. The series was relaunched by Pearson in 2011.
Inspired by the African Writers Series, Leon Comber launched the Writing in Asia Series in 1966 from Singapore. Two Austin Coates books in the series, Myself a Mandarin and City of Broken Promises, became bestsellers, but the series, after publishing more than 70 titles, was to fold in 1984 when Heinemann Asia was taken over by a parent group of publishers.