 | |
| Industry | Media |
|---|---|
| Founded | 1964 |
| Defunct | 1991 |
| Fate | Administration |
| Headquarters | London, UK |
Key people | Robert Maxwell (Chairman) |
Maxwell Communication Corporation plc was a leading British media business. It was listed on the London Stock Exchange and was a constituent of the FTSE 100 Index. It collapsed in 1991 following the death of its titular owner.
The company was established in 1964 when Hazell Sun merged with Purnell & Sons (which also owned book publisher Macdonald) to form the British Printing Corporation. [1] In 1967, the British Printing Corporation merged its magazines into Haymarket Group. [2] During the 1970s the British Printing Corporation was involved in many disputes with trade unions. [3] In 1978 such a dispute led to The Times and Sunday Times not being published for ten months. [3]
In July 1981, Robert Maxwell launched a dawn raid on the company, acquiring a stake of 29%; the following year he secured full control of it. [3] He changed the name of the company to British Printing & Communications Corporation in March 1982 and to Maxwell Communication Corporation in October 1987.
The company acquired Macmillan Publishers, a large US publisher, in 1988. [4] It went on to buy Science Research Associates and the Official Airline Guide later that year. [5] SRA was sold to a joint venture of Maxwell's Macmillan and McGraw Hill the next year. [6]
The company went into administration in 1991 following the death of Robert Maxwell. [7] Its properties were sold to various media companies. Time Warner (then parent of Little, Brown and Company) acquired Macdonald. [8] McGraw Hill acquired that part of Macmillan/McGraw Hill it did not already own outright. OAG was acquired by Reed Elsevier, [9] while Macmillan was folded into Simon & Schuster. [10]
In 1999, British courts determined that Coopers & Lybrand had made gross errors during their audits of the Maxwell group of companies and fined Coopers & Lybrand a record £3.3 million. [11]
Random House is an American book publisher and the largest general-interest paperback publisher in the world. Random House has several independently managed subsidiaries around the world. It is part of Penguin Random House, which is owned by German media conglomerate Bertelsmann.
Doubleday is an American publishing company. It was founded as the Doubleday & McClure Company in 1897 and was the largest in the United States by 1947. It published the work of mostly U.S. authors under a number of imprints and distributed them through its own stores. In 2009, Doubleday merged with Knopf Publishing Group to form the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, which is now part of Penguin Random House. In 2019, the official website presents Doubleday as an imprint, not a publisher.
Rand McNally is an American technology and publishing company that provides mapping, software and hardware for consumer electronics, commercial transportation and education markets. The company is headquartered in Chicago, with a distribution center in Richmond, Kentucky.
S&P Global Inc. is an American publicly traded corporation headquartered in Manhattan, New York City. Its primary areas of business are financial information and analytics. It is the parent company of S&P Global Ratings, S&P Global Market Intelligence, S&P Global Mobility, S&P Global Engineering Solutions, S&P Global Sustainable1, and S&P Global Commodity Insights, CRISIL, and is the majority owner of the S&P Dow Jones Indices joint venture. "S&P" is a shortening of "Standard and Poor's".
Holtzbrinck Publishing Group is a privately held German company headquartered in Stuttgart, that owns publishing companies worldwide. Through Macmillan Publishers, it is one of the Big Five English-language publishing companies.
Pearson plc is a British multinational publishing and education company headquartered in London, England.
Simon & Schuster Inc. 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.
Dorling Kindersley Limited is a British multinational publishing company specialising in illustrated reference books for adults and children in 63 languages. It is part of Penguin Random House, a subsidiary of German media conglomerate Bertelsmann. Established in 1974, DK publishes a range of titles in genres including travel, history, geography, science, space, nature, sports, gardening, cookery, parenting and many others. The worldwide CEO of DK is Paul Kelly. DK has offices in New York, Melbourne, London, Munich, New Delhi, Toronto, Madrid, Beijing, and Jiangmen. DK works with licensing partners such as Disney, LEGO, DC Comics, the Royal Horticultural Society, MasterChef, and the Smithsonian Institution. DK has commissioned authors such as Mary Berry, Monty Don, Robert Winston, Huw Richards, and Steve Mould for a range of books.
Pergamon Press was an Oxford-based publishing house, founded by Paul Rosbaud and Robert Maxwell, that published scientific and medical books and journals. Originally called Butterworth-Springer, it is now an imprint of Elsevier.
RentPath Inc. is a media company that owns Rent.com, ApartmentGuide.com, Lovely, and Rentals.com, which combined see 16 million visitors each month. It was previously called K-III and PriMedia. The company was acquired by Redfin in April 2021.
Charles Scribner's Sons, or simply Scribner's or Scribner, is an American publisher based in New York City, known for publishing 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.
Pearson Education, known since 2011 as simply Pearson, is the educational publishing and services subsidiary of the international corporation Pearson plc.
OAG is a global travel data provider with headquarters in the UK. The company was founded in 1929 and is operated in the USA, Singapore, Japan, Lithuania and China. It has a large network of flight information data including schedules, flight status, connection times, and industry references such as airport codes.
Purnell and Sons started out as a small family printers based in Somerset which merged with other printers over the next 100 years to become one the largest print groups in the UK and at one time a major publisher.
Ian Robert Maxwell was a Czechoslovak-born British media proprietor, member of parliament (MP), suspected spy, and fraudster.
Prentice Hall was a major American educational publisher. It published print and digital content for the 6–12 and higher-education market. It was an independent company throughout the bulk of the twentieth century. In its last few years it was owned by, then absorbed into, Savvas Learning Company. In the web era it distributed its technical titles through the Safari Books Online e-reference service for some years.
Science Research Associates (SRA) was a Chicago-based publisher of educational materials and schoolroom reading comprehension products. The company was acquired by McGraw-Hill Education in the early 2000s.
Kevin Francis Herbert Maxwell is a British businessman. In the 1990s, Maxwell was acquitted of charges relating to financial crimes connected with the business practices of his father, publishing tycoon Robert Maxwell. Formerly disqualified from being a company director, he has been declared bankrupt twice. He is co-founder of the thinktank Combating Jihadist Terrorism.
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.
McGraw Hill is an American publishing company for educational content, software, and services for pre-K through postgraduate education. It is one of the "big three" educational publishers along with Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and Pearson Education. The company also publishes reference and trade publications for medicine, business, and engineering. Formerly a division of The McGraw Hill Companies, McGraw Hill Education was divested and acquired by Apollo Global Management in March 2013 for $2.4 billion. McGraw Hill was sold in 2021 to Platinum Equity for $4.5 billion.
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