Regnery Publishing has existed as a series of companies associated with Henry Regnery. The first, Henry Regnery Company, was founded in Chicago in 1947 and split in 1977, forming Regnery Gateway Inc. and Contemporary Books Inc. Under the leadership of Henry Regnery's son, Alfred Regnery, Regnery Gateway became the present-day Regnery Publishing.[6]
After helping to found Human Events as a weekly newsletter, Regnery began publishing monthly pamphlets and books. Some of the first pamphlets he published, including a reprint of a speech by University of Chicago president Robert M. Hutchins, criticized the harsh treatment of Germans and Japanese both in popular attitudes and in postwar administration of the former Axis countries.[7]
Regnery published the pamphlets and some books under the name Human Events Associates in 1946. He began publishing under his own name in September 1947. The first book published by the Henry Regnery Company was by socialistVictor Gollancz, who ran the Left Book Club in Great Britain. A man of Jewish heritage, Gollancz was appalled at the bombing of German civilians late in the war and by the treatment of the country afterward. Gollancz published In Darkest Germany in Britain but was unable to find an American publisher for his ideas. He approached Regnery, who agreed to publish it. Regnery subsequently published the U.S. edition of Our Threatened Values by Gollancz.[7]
Regnery's third book was The Hitler in Our Selves, by Max Picard. Other early books included The German Opposition to Hitler by the German nationalist Hans Rothfels and The High Cost of Vengeance (1949) by Freda Utley which was critical of the Allies' air campaign and post-war occupation. Utley's book was the first Regnery book to be reviewed in The New York Times, where it was excoriated.[8]Reinhold Niebuhr gave it a positive review in The Nation magazine.[7]
The company was founded as a nonprofit corporation. Regnery later wrote that it was initially organized that way, "not because I had any ideological objection to profits, but because, as it seemed to me then, and does still, in matters of excellence the market is a poor judge. The books that are most needed are often precisely those that will have only a modest sale." The Internal Revenue Service forced the company to be reorganized as a for-profit concern on March 1, 1948. Regnery hired his first few employees that year.[7]
Regnery published some of the first and most important books of the postwar American conservative movement. "[I]t was a measure of the grip that liberal-minded editors had on American publishing at the time that Regnery, which was founded in 1947, was one of only two houses known to be sympathetic to conservative authors", according to Henry Regnery's 1996 obituary in The New York Times.
In the early 1950s, Regnery published two books by Robert Welch, who went on to found the John Birch Society in 1958. In May God Forgive Us, Welch criticized influential foreign-policy analysts and policymakers and accused many of working to further Communism as part of a conspiracy.[9] In 1954, Regnery published Welch's biography of John Birch, an American Baptist missionary in China who was killed by Chinese Communists after he became a U.S. intelligence officer in World War II.
In 1951, Regnery published God and Man at Yale, the first book written by William F. Buckley, Jr. At that time, Regnery had a close affiliation with the University of Chicago and published classics for the Great Books series at the University, but he lost the contract as a result of publishing Buckley's book.[6]
In 1954, Regnery published McCarthy and His Enemies by William F. Buckley and L. Brent Bozell Jr. "Although Mr. Buckley [...] had criticized the senator for 'gross exaggerations,' Mr. McCarthy said he would not dispute the merits of the book with the authors", according to a news article in The New York Times. While criticizing McCarthy, the book was sympathetic to him (and in fact was harsher on McCarthy's critics than it was on the senator for making false allegations[10]), and McCarthy attended a reception for the authors.[11]
In 1977, the Henry Regnery Company split, with Henry Regnery moving to Washington D.C. to form Regnery Gateway Inc. He took with him many of the Henry Regnery Company's rights to political, philosophical, psychological, and religious books along with a few select titles from other genres and the trademark for the Gateway Editions series. The original Henry Regnery Company remained in Chicago and was renamed Contemporary Books. Contemporary was purchased by Tribune Company and merged with Compton's Multimedia Publishing Group to form Tribune Education,[12] which was acquired in 2000 by McGraw-Hill.[13]
In the 1980s, Alfred S. Regnery, son of Henry Regnery, took control of Regnery Gateway.
In 1993, the Regnery family sold the publishing company to Phillips Publishing International, which put the book publishing company into its Eagle Publishing subsidiary, which also published the weekly Human Events.[14][15] At that time, Regnery Gateway was renamed Regnery Publishing Inc. Alfred Regnery left his post as president of Regnery Publishing in the 2000s to become the publisher of The American Spectator magazine.[16] Alex Novak, son of political columnist Robert Novak, is associate publisher of Regnery's history imprint.
In November 2007, Jerome Corsi, Bill Gertz, Robert "Buzz" Patterson, Joel Mowbray, and Richard Miniter, five authors whose works had been published by Regnery, filed a lawsuit over royalties claiming that Regnery had been self-dealing by diverting book sales away from retail outlets and to book clubs and other channels owned by Regnery's then-parent company, Eagle Publishing.[18] On January 30, 2008, a federal judge dismissed all eight counts of the lawsuit because the authors had signed contracts with Regnery which included a mandatory arbitration clause in their contracts, and three of the authors later sought arbitration (Miniter, Corsi, and Mowbray).[19][20][21] In December 2011, the American Arbitration Association released its decision on the arbitration case, ruling in favor of Regnery on all counts.[22]
In January 2014, Regnery was acquired along with other Eagle Publishing properties by Salem Communications.[23]
On July 18, 2018, Simon & Schuster issued a press release announcing an international distribution agreement with Regnery Publishing to begin July 2018. According to the terms of the agreement, Regnery retained responsibility for sales of its titles in the United States while Simon & Schuster began to handle distribution in the United States and both sales and distribution in Canada and export markets around the world.[24]
In 2020, Regnery Publishing published Irreversible Damage, a book that endorses the controversial concept of rapid-onset gender dysphoria (ROGD),[25] despite the lack of evidence supporting a diagnosis.[citation needed]
After U.S. Senator Josh Hawley lost a publishing contract with Simon & Schuster in the aftermath of the 2021 storming of the U.S. Capitol for his role in objecting to the certification of the Electoral College results in the 2020 presidential election, Regnery Publishing said it would publish Hawley's book.[26]
In December 2023, Skyhorse Publishing announced that it was purchasing Regnery, with Skyhorse president Tony Lyons becoming publisher of Regnery.[5] In January 2024, Skyhorse announced the phasing out of Regnery's religious imprint, Salem Books, in favor of Skyhorse's existing Good Books imprint.[29]
Reception
In November 2001, Nicholas Confessore, then a writer for the American Prospect, wrote the following about Regnery's position in the publishing world:
Welcome to the world of Regnery Publishing—lifestyle press for conservatives, preferred printer of presidential hopefuls, and venerable publisher of books for the culture wars. Call it—gracelessly but more accurately—a medium-sized, loosely linked network of conservative types, with few degrees of separation and similar political aims. Just don't call it a conspiracy.[30]
In August 2006, one critic called The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design "not only politically incorrect but incorrect in most other ways as well: scientifically, logically, historically, legally, academically, and morally."[32]
In May 2008, Chris Mooney criticized The Politically Incorrect Guide to Science as "The Incorrect Guide to Science."[33] Peter Bacon of Harvard Political Review took issue with The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Civil War for its "cherry-picked research and one-sided judgments of figures."[34]
Related Research Articles
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Pocket Books is a division of Simon & Schuster that primarily publishes paperback books.
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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.
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Winifred Utley, commonly known as Freda Utley, was an English scholar, political activist and best-selling author. After visiting the Soviet Union in 1927 as a trade union activist, she joined the Communist Party of Great Britain in 1928. Later, married and living in Moscow, she quickly became disillusioned with communism. When her Russian husband, Arcadi Berdichevsky, was arrested in 1936, she escaped to England with her young son.
The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History is a work of paleoconservative literature covering various issues in U.S. history by Thomas E. Woods, published in December 2004. This book was the first in the Politically Incorrect Guide series published by Regnery Publishing, who view the series as covering topics without consideration for political correctness. The book was present on The New York Times best-seller list for many weeks.
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Henry Francis Regnery (1912–1996) was a conservative American publisher who founded the newspaper Human Events (1944) and the Henry Regnery Company (1947) and published Russell Kirk's classic work The Conservative Mind (1953).
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Samuel W. Mitcham Jr. is an American author and military historian who specializes in the German war effort during World War II and the Confederate war effort during the American Civil War. He is the author of more than 40 books and has collaborated with other historians such as Gene Mueller.
The Tyranny of Big Tech is a 2021 book written by Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri. The book's claim is that Facebook, Google, Amazon and Apple are the "gravest threat to American liberty since the monopolies of the Gilded age" because of their anti-conservative bias. Hawley says that he is fighting to "recover America's populist democracy". The book's original publisher, Simon & Schuster, cancelled the contract on January 7, 2021 after the storming of the United States Capitol on January 6 and Hawley's rejection of electoral votes in the 2020 United States presidential election. Regnery Publishing acquired the book on January 18 with a May 4 release date.
Manhood: The Masculine Virtues America Needs is a book by American senator Josh Hawley. It was published by American conservative publisher Regnery Publishing on May 16, 2023. Manhood extensively draws on the Bible to argue a version of masculinity as a form of self improvement. It was panned by critics but praised by conservative commentators prior to its release. Versions of the book, including the audiobook, charted in various sections on Amazon's best sellers list.
↑ Smith, Robert Aura, "One Man's Opinions", book review in The New York Times, November 16, 1952.
↑ White, William S., "What the McCarthy Method Seeks to Establish", book review of McCarthy and His Enemies, The New York Times, April 4, 1954.
↑ Conklin, William R., "M'Carthy Seeking To Push Inquiries: Would Turn to Other Cases if Army Dispute Is Delayed by Hunt for Counsel" , The New York Times, March 31, 1954.
↑ "Simon & Schuster and Regnery Publishing in Worldwide Distribution Agreement". Simon & Schuster. 18 January 2018. Archived from the original(Press release) on 7 July 2019. Retrieved 7 July 2019. Simon & Schuster, Inc., announced today that it has entered into a distribution agreement with Regnery Publishing, a leading publisher of conservative books. Under the agreement, beginning July 1, 2018, Simon & Schuster will handle distribution for Regnery titles in all markets and territories around the world. Regnery will continue to be responsible for sales of its titles in the United States, while Simon & Schuster will handle sales in Canada and export markets.
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