Macmillan Publishers (United States)

Brett family

George Edward Brett opened the first Macmillan office in the United States in 1869 and Macmillan sold its U.S. operations to the Brett family, George Platt Brett, Sr. and George Platt Brett Jr. in 1896, resulting in the creation of an American company, Macmillan Publishing.^[2] Even with the split of the American company from its parent company in Britain, George Brett Jr. and Harold Macmillan remained close personal friends.^[3]

George P. Brett Jr. made the following comments in a letter dated 23 January 1947 to Daniel Macmillan about his family's devotion to the American publishing industry:

For the record my grandfather was employed by Macmillan's of England as a salesman. He came to the United States with his family in the service of Macmillan's of England and built up a business of approximately $50,000 before he died. He was succeeded . . . by my father, who eventually incorporated The Macmillan Company of New York and built up business of about $9,000,000. I succeeded my father, and we currently doing a business of approximately $12,000,000. So then, the name of Brett and the name of Macmillan have been and are synonymous in the United States.

Under the leadership of the Brett family, MacMillan served as the publisher of American authors, Winston Churchill,^[4] Margaret Mitchell, who wrote Gone with the Wind,^[5] and Jack London,^[6] author of White Fang and Call of the Wild.

The Bretts remained in control of the American offices of Macmillan from its creation in 1869 to the early 1960s, "a span matched by few other families in the history of United States business."^[3]

Mergers and end

Through its merger with Crowell Collier Publishing Company in 1961 and other acquisitions (notably The Scribner Book Companies in 1984), the US 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 sold to Simon & Schuster in 1994, in the wake of Maxwell's death (in 1991) and the subsequent bankruptcy proceedings.^[7] (At the time, Viacom had just purchased S&S via the acquisition of its former parent company Paramount Communications; it is now owned by CBS Corporation.) Macmillan Publishing USA became the name of Simon & Schuster's reference division. Pearson acquired the Macmillan name in America since 1998, following its purchase of the Simon & Schuster educational and professional group (which included various Macmillan properties).^[1] Pearson sold the Macmillan Reference USA division (which included Scribner Reference) to Thomson Gale in 1999.

Macmillan's school publishing operations were merged into a joint operation with McGraw-Hill in 1989. McGraw-Hill acquired full ownership of Macmillan/McGraw-Hill in 1993 after Maxwell's death.^[8]

Holtzbrinck

Holtzbrinck purchased most of the rights to the Macmillan name from Pearson in 2001,^[9] but not any of the businesses then associated with it. Holtzbrinck rebranded its US division with the name in 2007.^[1]

The online user-maintained database Jacketflap reports these constituent American publishers of Holtzbrinck's Macmillan division (August 2010):^[10]

Farrar Straus and Giroux, Henry Holt & Company, W.H. Freeman and Worth Publishers, Palgrave Macmillan, Bedford/St. Martin's, Picador, Roaring Brook Press, St. Martin’s Press, Tor Books, and Bedford Freeman & Worth Publishing Group.