Parent company | Simon & Schuster |
---|---|
Founded | 1959 |
Founder | Alfred A. Knopf, Jr., Simon Michael Bessie and Hiram Haydn |
Country of origin | United States |
Headquarters location | New York City |
Publication types | Books |
Fiction genres | Children's literature |
Imprints | Caitlyn Dlouhy Books |
Owner(s) | Kohlberg Kravis Roberts |
Official website | simonandschusterpublishing |
Atheneum Books was a New York City publishing house established in 1959 by Alfred A. Knopf, Jr., Simon Michael Bessie and Hiram Haydn. Simon & Schuster has owned Atheneum properties since it acquired Macmillan in 1994, and it created Atheneum Books for Young Readers as an imprint for children's books in the 2000s.
Alfred A. Knopf, Jr. left his family publishing house Alfred A. Knopf and created Atheneum Books in 1959 with Simon Michael Bessie (Harpers) and Hiram Haydn (Random House). [1] [lower-alpha 1] It became the publisher of Pulitzer Prize winners Edward Albee, Charles Johnson, James Merrill, Nikki Giovanni, Mona Van Duyn and Theodore H. White. It also published Ernest Gaines' first book Catherine Carmier (1964). Knopf recruited editor Jean E. Karl to establish a Children's Book Department in 1961. [2] [3] Atheneum acquired the reprint house Russell & Russell in 1965. [4]
Atheneum merged with Charles Scribner's Sons to become The Scribner Book Company in 1978. The acquisition included Rawson Associates. Scribner was acquired by Macmillan in 1984. Macmillan was purchased by Simon & Schuster in 1994. [5] After the merger, the Atheneum adult list was merged into Scribner and the Scribner children's line was merged into Atheneum. [6] [7]
In the 2000s, the Simon & Schuster imprint Atheneum Books for Young Readers published the popular May Bird fantasy series for young adults, inaugurated by May Bird and the Ever After (2005), and the Olivia series of picture books featuring Olivia the pig (from 2000). The Higher Power of Lucky won the 2007 Newbery Medal. In a 2007 online poll, the National Education Association listed Bunnicula: A Rabbit-Tale of Mystery as one of its Teachers' Top 100 Books for Children. [8]
Random House is an imprint and publishing group of Penguin Random House. Founded in 1927 by businessmen Bennett Cerf and Donald Klopfer as an imprint of Modern Library, it quickly overtook Modern Library as the parent imprint. Over the following decades, a series of acquisitions made it into one of the largest publishers in the United States. In 2013, it was merged with Penguin Group to form Penguin Random House, which is owned by the Germany-based media conglomerate Bertelsmann. Penguin Random House uses its brand for Random House Publishing Group and Random House Children's Books, as well as several imprints.
Doubleday is an American publishing company. It was founded as the Doubleday & McClure Company in 1897. By 1947, it was the largest book publisher in the United States. It published the work of mostly U.S. authors under a number of imprints and distributed them through its own stores.
Simon & Schuster LLC is an American publishing company owned by Kohlberg Kravis Roberts. It was founded in New York City on January 2, 1924, by Richard L. Simon and M. Lincoln Schuster. Along with Penguin Random House, Hachette, HarperCollins and Macmillan Publishers, Simon & Schuster is considered one of the 'Big Five' English language publishers. As of 2017, Simon & Schuster was the third largest publisher in the United States, publishing 2,000 titles annually under 35 different imprints.
Macmillan Publishers is a British publishing company traditionally considered to be one of the "Big Five" English language publishers. Founded in London in 1843 by Scottish brothers Daniel and Alexander MacMillan, the firm would soon establish itself as a leading publisher in Britain. It published two of the best-known works of Victorian-era children's literature, Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book (1894).
Charles Scribner's Sons, or simply Scribner's or Scribner, is an American publisher based in New York City that has published several notable American authors, including Henry James, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Kurt Vonnegut, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Stephen King, Robert A. Heinlein, Thomas Wolfe, George Santayana, John Clellon Holmes, Don DeLillo, and Edith Wharton.
Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. is an American publishing house that was founded by Blanche Knopf and Alfred A. Knopf Sr. in 1915. Blanche and Alfred traveled abroad regularly and were known for publishing European, Asian, and Latin American writers in addition to leading American literary trends. It was acquired by Random House in 1960, and is now part of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group division of Penguin Random House which is owned by the German conglomerate Bertelsmann.
Gale is a global provider of research and digital learning resources. The company is based in Farmington Hills, Michigan, United States, west of Detroit. It has been a division of Cengage since 2007.
Hachette Book Group (HBG) is a publishing company owned by Hachette Livre, the largest publishing company in France, and the third largest trade and educational publisher in the world. Hachette Livre is a wholly owned subsidiary of Lagardère Group. HBG was formed when Hachette Livre purchased the Time Warner Book Group from Time Warner on March 31, 2006. Its headquarters are located at 1290 Avenue of the Americas, Midtown Manhattan, New York City. Hachette is considered one of the "big five" publishing companies, along with Holtzbrinck/Macmillan, Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, and Simon & Schuster. In one year, HBG publishes approximately 1400+ adult books, 300 books for young readers, and 450 audiobook titles. In 2017, the company had 167 books on the New York Times bestseller list, 34 of which reached No. 1.
Free Press was an American independent book publisher that later became an imprint of Simon & Schuster. It was one of the best-known publishers specializing in serious nonfiction, including path-breaking sociology books of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. After a period under new ownership in the 1980s of publishing neoconservative books, it was purchased by Simon & Schuster in 1994. By 2012, the imprint ceased to exist as a distinct entity; however, some books were still being published using the Free Press imprint.
David Small is an American writer and illustrator who is best known for children's picture books. His books have been awarded a Caldecott Medal and two Caldecott Honors, among other recognition.
Aladdin Paperbacks is one of several children's-book imprints owned by Simon & Schuster. It was established by Jean E. Karl at Atheneum Books where she was the founding director of the children's department (1961). Atheneum merged with or was acquired by Scribner's in 1978, then Macmillan in 1984, before the acquisition by Simon & Schuster in 1994.
Alice Dalgliesh was a naturalized American writer and publisher who wrote more than 40 fiction and non-fiction books, mainly for children. She has been called "a pioneer in the field of children's historical fiction". Three of her books were runners-up for the annual Newbery Medal, the partly autobiographical The Silver Pencil, The Bears on Hemlock Mountain, and The Courage of Sarah Noble, which was also named to the Lewis Carroll Shelf Award list.
Peter Kommer Parnall is an American artist and writer, best known for his work on books for younger readers. His work has earned him high praise and a number of awards. Some of his books have become collector items.
The Reference and User Services Association (RUSA) is a division of the American Library Association.
Macmillan Inc. was an American book publishing company originally established as the American division of the British Macmillan Publishers. The two were later separated and acquired by other companies, with the remnants of the original American division of Macmillan present in McGraw-Hill Education's Macmillan/McGraw-Hill textbooks, Gale's Macmillan Reference USA division, and some trade imprints of Simon & Schuster that were transferred when both companies were owned by Paramount Communications.
Jean Edna Karl was an American book editor who specialized in children's and science fiction titles. She founded and led the children's division and young adult and science fiction imprints at Atheneum Books, where she oversaw or edited books that won two Caldecott Medals and five Newbery Medals. One of the Newberys went to the new writer E. L. Konigsburg in 1968 for From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler.
Penguin Random House LLC is a British-American multinational conglomerate publishing company formed on July 1, 2013, with the merger of Penguin Books and Random House. Penguin Books was originally founded in 1935 and Random House was founded in 1927. It has more than 300 publishing imprints. Along with Simon & Schuster, Hachette, HarperCollins and Macmillan Publishers, Penguin Random House is considered one of the 'Big Five' English language publishers.
Hiram Collins Haydn was an American writer and editor. He was editor in chief at Random House before leaving to help establish Atheneum Publishing. He was also the editor of Phi Beta Kappa's literary journal, The American Scholar, from 1944 to 1973.
Julian Messner, Inc. was an American publishing house founded in 1933. Its best-selling books included 1956's Peyton Place. In the 1960s it became a division of Simon & Schuster, and continued as a children's imprint into the 1990s.
Alfred A. Knopf Jr., who left the noted publishing house run by his parents to become one of the founders of Atheneum Publishers in 1959, died on Saturday. He was 90, the last of the surviving founders, and lived in New York City.
In 1978 Scribner acquired Atheneum, publishers of Edward Albee, Charles Johnson, and Theodore H. White. The Atheneum acquisition also brought with it the Rawson Associates imprint. And in 1984, the Scribner Book Companies, which by then included a great children's division and a distinguished reference division, merged with Macmillan.