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To all the people around the world who have called Macmillan home and worked to create such a vibrant publishing enterprise

ONE

“If a Large Tree Grows from This Small Seed, We Shall Be Grateful.”

THE STORY OF DANIEL AND ALEXANDER MACMILLAN

As do some of the novels that fill the books on the shelves of Macmillan’s various publishers, The Macmillan Story itself begins with a story of two brothers: Daniel and Alexander Macmillan. Daniel, the older of the two and the tenth child in a family of twelve, was born to Duncan and Katherine Crawford Macmillan at Upper Corrie on the Isle of Arran on 13 September 1813. The Macmillan clan hailed from the opposite coast of Argyllshire, where a long spit of land known as North Knapdale was their ancestral seat. Their grandfathers, church elders Malcolm Macmillan and William Crawford, were on opposite sides of the evangelical revival that coursed through Scotland during the nineteenth century. While Elder Macmillan was committed to the traditional theology of the Scottish church, Elder Crawford was open to the Haldane revivalism that promised a freshening of the church’s worship. In these two men, one can see the conflicting characteristics that were to influence Daniel and Alexander as they made their way towards the building of a great publishing house: a belief in order and duty, but also an emphasis on progress.

Daniel and Alexander’s father, Duncan Macmillan, was a subsistence farmer who took over his father-in-law’s small plot of land shortly after he married Katherine Crawford. The house was described later in life by Alexander as “a most humble house on the brow of a hill overlooking the sea and getting, on fine days, a clear view of the Ayrshire coast.”¹ Duncan was a hardworking farmer who provided his family with, at best, a humble life. As Thomas Hughes described in his memoir of Daniel Macmillan, “it would seem that at times good and sufficient food was scarcely abundant enough in the household. The little farm was strenuously and intelligently cultivated by Duncan, but, poor in soil and small in extent, could with difficulty be made to yield anything beyond the necessaries of life for his family.”² Still, Daniel thought fondly of him: “I was very young, only ten, when he died, I have the deepest reverence for him. He was a hardworking man, a most devout man.… I now remember with pleasure, and with something better than pleasure, the manner in which he conducted family worship. Though I did not understand a word of his prayer, the very act of bowing down on my knees did me good, at least I think so.”³

Katherine Crawford Macmillan was the parent who provided the inspiration to Daniel and Alexander that allowed them to imagine a life beyond the humble farm. In a letter written in 1833, Daniel wrote of his feelings for her, allowing us to see her influence plainly: “Of my mother I can speak what I do know. I know her as well as a son knew a parent and my persuasion is that she is the most perfect lady in all Scotland. With so little knowledge derived from books, with so very little intercourse with the higher ranks of society, with so little care of thought on what is most pleasing in external conduct, was there ever a lady who, so instinctively, so naturally did what was right, acted with so much propriety in all cases?… I think she has one of the finest, I mean the most refined minds I ever came into contact with.…”⁴ Possibly, her most interesting characteristic for The Macmillan Story and for the progress of her two sons is that she found time to read the great books. “There is a story of a visitor calling upon her in her old age at Irvine and finding her in her bed in her black ‘mutch’ reading Dante. She sang ballads and hymns with a pathos which made the promise of a song the reward.”⁵

In 1816, Duncan Macmillan and his family emigrated from Arran to the little town of Irvine in Ayshire on the opposite coast where Alexander was born on 3 October 1818. Duncan’s two older sons were already established there as carpenters, but both eventually began to work as teachers. Malcolm, one of the two older sons who turned to a life of the mind after he was injured in a building accident, was a schoolmaster when his father died in 1823. From then on, he helped to support his mother and the education of his brothers and sisters from his schoolmaster’s pay. There was, sadly, never any chance of sending either Daniel or Alexander to university. Neither of them got more than a primary school education, but Malcolm helped them both get their start in the world.

A BOOKSELLER’S APPRENTICE AND A YOUNG SCHOOLMASTER

On 1 January 1824, Daniel, with his brother’s help, secured a place for himself as an apprentice to Maxwell Dick, a bookseller and bookbinder in Irvine. His contract specified that Daniel would work for Mr. Dick for six years, though his time there continued slightly beyond. He flourished in the job and on 14 February 1831, Maxwell Dick wrote that “the said Daniel has served me with diligence, honesty and sobriety and it is with the utmost confidence I can recommend him as possessing these qualities in a very high degree.”⁶

When the apprenticeship ended, Daniel set off for Stirling, where Malcolm had become the minister of a Baptist congregation. Daniel had his sights set on a bigger life. “Malcolm had found a situation for me. I had not enough to do and felt the place dull. I wished to go to Glasgow or Edinburgh or some large town where there would be more room and better chances of rising.”⁷ At this point in his life, Daniel began to experience the early stages of the ill health that would afflict him throughout his life, though it never—until his far-too-early death—stopped him from working hard to make his publishing house the best it could be.

He traveled to Glasgow, where he began work for Mr. Atkinson, a bookseller in the Trongate, one of the oldest streets in the city of Glasgow. Like many of the employees at Macmillan today who left a small town behind for a career in a big-city publishing house, Daniel had dreams and was willing to work hard. “I hoped for a partnership in the business. I worked hard and closely from early till late. I was always at work at seven, and never or hardly ever away before nine. It was often ten, eleven, and twelve before I got away.”⁸

The hard work Daniel did for Mr. Atkinson, a man who was very ill himself, began to take its toll on his own health and he began to exhibit the symptoms of what was, most likely, tuberculosis. In December 1832, he writes, “How ill I am. I feel as if I were dying. I have no one to sympathise [sic] with me; no one to mitigate my suffering; no comfort but what my paltry salary can procure.” Very much alone in the world, he goes on: “But why did I shed tears? I cannot help them. They are not in vain. They do good to myself. They relieve my feelings. They soften my heart.”⁹ Not until June of the following year, after convalescing at his home, was Daniel ready to go back to work.

Both Daniel and Alexander were fortunate in having friends who could help them advance in the world, especially now since Daniel’s ambitions were turning south towards London, “[that] mighty mass of brick and smoke and shipping, / Dirty and dusky, but as wide as eye / Could reach.”¹⁰ One of Daniel’s friends was a young man named James MacLehose, who was working at the publishing house of Messrs. Seeley in Fleet Street. Daniel wrote to James asking particulars about work and lodging, what the other men working at the house were like, how big the warehouse was and whether there was a place for him. MacLehose writes him back with specifics and Daniel responds, “I am every day getting better, and hope soon to be able to manage the gigantic work of a London bookseller’s life in winter, with ease and pleasure.”¹¹

By September 1833, Daniel was in London, lodging with James MacLehose and visiting all the publishing houses looking for work—Longman’s, Murray, Simpkin and Marshall, Wightman—but to no avail. He was fortunate, though, to be recommended by Mr. Wightman to a bookseller in Cambridge named Johnson. Finding no employment in London, Daniel set off for Cambridge by coach through “the clean neat English villages and villagers, the beautiful lawns and trees and old mansion-houses” to take up his job at thirty pounds per year.

*   *   *

During the years that Daniel was apprenticing himself to publishers and making his way to Cambridge, his brother Alexander was making his way in a different world. At sixteen, he was the headmaster of Scott’s School in Irvine. Not there for long, Alexander was apprenticed to Mr. George Gallie, a well-known Glasgow bookseller, the same old-fashioned Scotsman to whom James MacLehose was apprenticed. Mr. Gallie’s shop was not far from Mr. Atkinson’s, where Daniel was apprenticed. For a time, at least, they grew closer.

Mr. Gallie must have been a memorable character, described in Alexander Macmillan’s memoir as “a ‘kenspeckle’ character, at bottom a man of rare virtue, true and tried, at top, undoubtedly trying.”¹² He opened the shop promptly at six every morning; he dealt mostly in tracts and religious books and never stocked anything that he disapproved of. This latter aspect of Mr. Gallie’s character was to be Alexander’s downfall when, one day, Gallie discovered that Alexander read novels. “My leaving dear George Gallie arose from his piety in excess. He objected to my reading novels and one day found a volume of The Midnight Ball, I think, but at least one of the Minerva Press novels in the pocket of my overcoat which was hanging up in the passage. He pulled it out, tore it to pieces and flung it into the fire.”¹³

From then on, Alexander made his way from one schoolmaster job to another, teaching in a commercial school, trying to get into the medical profession and even by making a voyage to America, serving as an ordinary seaman. When he returned to Glasgow, he was penniless. “I went about the streets of Glasgow looking out for any sort of employment and finally accepted, with the deepest joy, an ushership in a school with the munificent salary of twelve pounds a year on which I actually lived for nine months.”¹⁴

*   *   *

Daniel was to remain in Cambridge for three years, enjoying the town but still knowing that his heart was in London, no doubt remembering the sightseeing he did there—St. Paul’s, the Coliseum, the zoo and the gin-palaces, which he proclaimed as “most wonderful.” By the end of his first year, he wrote with a young man’s zeal that he knew about every book in the shop and was a master of the trade. His own reading was deepened with Byron, Hume, Gibbon, Paley, Sterne, Fielding and Swift, as well as other novels, plays and theological tracts that have “unhinged my mind.”¹⁵ His notebooks were filled with thoughts and rules on study and reading, on meditation and reflection, on fixing the attention, on enlarging the capacity of the mind.¹⁶ By 1837, however, even though his time in Cambridge clearly had helped him to develop the mind of a publisher, he felt he needed to move on. His first stop was Scotland, where he stayed for three months recovering from another bout of illness, but then one day, in reply to a letter he wrote James MacLehose bemoaning his lot, came an offer from the Messrs. Seeley’s shop in London, and he was finally on his way to being installed in a position in their shop in Fleet Street.

LONDON

Daniel worked in London for seven years, leaving twice to recuperate from recurrent bouts of illness in Scotland. It’s a measure of his employers’ opinion of him that his position was never filled during his illness. He worked hard and kept a fine journal of his life there, which can also be seen as yet another aspect of his growing critical ability where writing is concerned. Journals can be suspicious chronicles of an individual’s life, but Daniel, giving a glimpse into his developing critical abilities and the respect that he regarded the written word, took time to reflect on his journal writing and that of others: “Men and women have filled journals and diaries with nonsense and cant. But yet I think that no argument against the thing. Pulpits and platforms are liable to the same abuse.… I now believe that keeping a journal does, or may, improve the mind and heart.”¹⁷

While he wrote, “London seems more of a home to me than any other place,”¹⁸ his mind was still with his family, some of whom—chiefly his sister Janet and his brother Alexander—were not faring well. He knew that Alexander needed a job and wrote in his journal, “My brother Alexander was keeping a village school in a place called Nitshill.… Sister Janet was keeping house for him, and a small sewing school by way of increasing their income. From all I could learn, they were not making the two ends meet. It seemed to me that if I could find a place for Alexander in London, it would be a good thing. I had scarcely returned when I learned that L. and G. Seeley wanted a young man. I spoke to G. Seeley about my brother; he agreed to take him.”¹⁹

Alexander arrived in London on 3 October 1839, and Janet followed on 2 November of that same year. They all lodged with Mrs. Nutters in Hoxton, but after a while, when it was clear that Mrs. Nutters and Miss Macmillan did not exactly see eye to eye, the three siblings found lodgings near the city, aided by a Mr. Edwards and his wife, who helped them to acquire furnishings inexpensively. This living arrangement, though, was not to be for long. Janet, it seemed, was also in ill health and, consequently, not the most ideal manager when it came to keeping house for her brothers. Their expenses soared to the point that Daniel was deeply in debt and there was no solution but for Janet to return to Scotland. To pay his debts, Daniel sold his entire library. Anyone who loves books will understand how big a sacrifice this must have been for Daniel, and yet—in another indication of his good character—he made the sacrifice for the well-being of his family.

With Janet back in Scotland, the brothers moved to lodgings in Charterhouse Square and were never apart after that. They become closer than before and their passion for reading deepened. Every morning, Alexander had to wake up at six o’clock to be in Fleet Street by eight. As he dressed and breakfasted, Daniel read to him. While Daniel had years to develop his own storehouse of literary knowledge, Alexander did not. His schooling ended when he was fifteen; the smattering of classics that he got in return for assisting the headmaster of the Irvine Academy might fairly be summed up in the phrase “small Latin and less Greek.” And of French or German he never had the chance of learning a word. Still, his four or five years of schoolmastering were an excellent preparation for one who was to deal largely in education publications. He had taught beginners, so he was a good judge of materials for beginners.²⁰

AT 57 ALDERSGATE STREET

The brothers worked diligently. By 1840, both were earning good salaries and living well within their means in the lodgings in Charterhouse Square, but having their own business was something both of them wished for. It wasn’t to come, though, for another three years. In 1843, they found a shop at 57 Aldersgate Street. With help from another benefactor, Mr. Burnside, they leased the shop and its furnishings for three months. In May, Daniel wrote to James MacLehose about the business, talking about it in much the same way a publisher might discuss his or her own business in today’s marketplace: “We are pushing hard to make a business and find it very uphill work. If the people had sense, they would come to us for books! We could sell them as cheap as any one—and we could give good information on all points connected with books! People would be glad if they only knew. But, alas for their ignorance!”²¹

The original shop at 57 Aldersgate Street

The “uphill work” didn’t deter them, however, and on 10 November 1843, Daniel and Alexander Macmillan published their first book, an educational treatise titled The Philosophy of Training by A. R. Craig, the late classical master at Glasgow Normal Seminary.²² The address of the publication given was 57 Aldersgate Street.

Daniel, at about this same time, began a correspondence that would change his life and the brothers’ futures. He had been reading a book called Guesses at Truth by Two Brothers. While it was initially published anonymously, one of the authors was Archdeacon Julius Charles Hare, son of a wealthy family and an assistant tutor at Cambridge for some time. He succeeded his uncle to the living at Herstmonceaux in Sussex, where he was the rector of Herstmonceaux and archbishop of Lewes. The enormous house was called Buckwell Place, where the archdeacon had amassed a library of more than twelve thousand volumes. Daniel, writing to the anonymous brothers using the Herstmonceaux address on the title page of the book, struck up a correspondence with a man he slowly realized was the archdeacon. Their lengthy and detailed correspondence encompassed every major author of the day. Musings on Thomas Carlyle and Charles Lamb were interspersed with discussions about morality and thoughts on the idea of truth. Clearly, these were two men of the same mind. Daniel finally visited Herstmonceaux to meet the archdeacon. One can only imagine the effect the house had on Daniel from the description of it in a letter he wrote to James MacLehose: “When one goes into it, it looks more like a library than a dwelling house. It is literally crammed with books—and such books—collected with such wisdom and care.… I was quite astonished. I saw many, very many books I had never heard of and many I had only heard of.”²³

The archdeacon became a regular customer in the shop on Aldersgate Street and wanted to help Daniel find a place where he could carry out the literary ideas contained in their correspondence. Daniel wrote to him, “We are content to make the best of the Aldersgate Street shop for the present, hoping to move west by and by. We have a very neat shop for a very small rent.… If a large tree grows from this small seed, we shall be grateful. If not, we shall be content; we shall feel that it is as it ought to be.”²⁴ Daniel, though outwardly expressing his contentment, was always on the lookout for something new, something that would allow the brothers to expand their business, and he was soon to find his opportunity.

CAMBRIDGE

In a letter dated 30 August 1843, Daniel wrote to Archdeacon Hare that friends had been encouraging him to open a shop in Cambridge. He was worried, though, that opening a new bookshop would look like an intrusion by an outsider, and an outsider who was a Scotsman at that. But, he goes on to say that a friend “wrote to tell me that Mr. Newby was going to dispose of his business.”²⁵ With this news, the archdeacon loaned Daniel five hundred pounds, and the purchase of the Trinity Street shop was completed, transferring the ownership from Mr. Newby to the two brothers. They were determined that the Aldersgate Street shop would remain open under Alexander’s management while Daniel took charge of the Cambridge shop. The second book they published was The Three Questions: What Am I? Whence Came I? Whither Do I Go? by William Haig Miller, and when the second edition was published, the title page clearly showed their commitment to the two shops: “Published by D&A. Macmillan, 57 Aldersgate Street and 17 Trinity Street, Cambridge.”²⁶

Daniel worked hard to make the Cambridge shop successful, but it was a heavy burden that fell to him. He rearranged stock, reorganized the business and began to develop a complete catalogue. The new business prospered from the very beginning with the support of the archdeacon and by the patronage of their friends, but the shop prospered mainly because of the personality and knowledge of its owner, who truly loved selling books to readers. The strain of doing all the work himself ultimately took its toll on Daniel. After a dangerous pulmonary hemorrhage set in, Alexander was summoned from London to look after both Daniel and the shop. In the following months, it was decided, with encouragement from the archdeacon, that the London shop would be closed. Alexander moved to Cambridge, and the brothers shared the work of the shop at 17 Trinity Street.

Though it was a necessity, Daniel lamented closing the Aldersgate Street shop. He was a committed bookseller, and he wrote to the archdeacon about his regret that he would no longer have the chance to recommend books to young Scottish ministers, missionaries and young men about to leave for the colonies, the most famous among them being David Livingstone. Daniel wrote, “I have had letters from such men thanking me most warmly for having recommended books to them which they found most useful in widening their minds without weakening their faith or lessening their activity or zeal.”²⁷ Besides the clear passion of a bookseller and publisher who loves connecting authors and readers, one can also see in Daniel’s letters to MacLehose, Archdeacon Hare and others the work of an extraordinarily thoughtful and engaged mind that was able to consider and connect issues of philosophy, theology, history and the politics of the day. And isn’t a nimble mind capable of making connections between disparate bits of knowledge the thing that makes a publisher, editor or bookseller truly great?

*   *   *

Cambridge, like Oxford, exerts a strong emotional pull that is intimately bound up with books and reading. Some of the greatest minds ever encountered walked the streets, bought books and, in some cases, changed the world. The allure of the city was no different for Daniel and Alexander Macmillan. The brothers remained at 17 Trinity Street in Cambridge until 1846, when they moved their shop farther along to 1 Trinity Street, acquiring the business of Mr. Thomas Stevenson. The building at 1 Trinity Street was a corner building with possibly the best location two publishers could ever hope for. The property was directly across the street from the Senate House, with King’s College just to the left. Daniel’s bedroom had south-facing views of the Great St. Mary’s Church. Besides being a pleasant bookshop with a superior location, the first-floor rooms served as an informal meeting place where students and dons would gather after dinner to chat and read the newspapers. The brothers worked hard to establish good relations with the students, and their effort shows in letters written by the undergraduates. One wrote, “When the Macmillans first established their shop in the heart of the University, on a well-chosen site opposite the gates of the Senate House, we undergraduates felt that, with men hardly older than ourselves, there was opened to us a new sphere of interest. They were the first booksellers whom I, for my own part, had ever known to take an enthusiastic interest in their business and to have a literary insight below the binding of their books.”²⁸

The shop became an important address in Cambridge much to the credit of Archdeacon Hare. In 1844, William Wordsworth paid a visit to the shop, at the request of the archdeacon, to call on Daniel. “He came upstairs,” wrote Daniel, “and stayed with me for an hour and a half and discoursed with all simplicity on all manner of subjects.” Wordsworth was to return several times to talk with him about the influence Scotland had had on him in his early life. On one occasion, Wordsworth signed at least one of the copies of his works on sale. It was a red-letter day for the brothers, which only served to burnish their success to an even greater degree.

Daniel wrote to Archdeacon Hare, “Things go very smoothly and prosperously with us and my brother is a very great comfort and help to me.” Even so, the problems Daniel had had with his health continued to plague him throughout the rest of his life and reduced the time he could spend working in the shop and living in Cambridge. He was frequently away from the shop, leaving Alexander in charge. While the publishing decisions were made by both of them, Alexander looked after the retail aspect of the business. Their letters back and forth not only dealt with the running of the business but also with the life of the mind, what they were reading, what they thought about political and theological movements and almost always centering on those in their sphere like Charles Kingsley, F. D. Maurice and other figures in the Christian socialist movement of the day. This was the period when Alexander came into his own. Through his letters, one can easily see the sharpening of an acute and critical mind. Charles Kingsley widened Macmillan’s scope in ways he might not have foreseen when he mentioned to the two brothers that he was writing a novel.

Charles Kingsley

WESTWARD HO!

Both brothers married in 1851. Daniel married Frances Orridge, the daughter of a Cambridge chemist. They had three sons, Frederick, Maurice and Arthur, and one daughter, Katherine. (Maurice married Helen Artie Tarleton Belles and their son, Maurice Harold Macmillan, became prime minister of the United Kingdom.) Alexander married twice, first to Caroline Brimley. They had five children: Malcolm, George, Margaret, Olive and William. Caroline died in 1871 and Alexander remarried a year later. His second wife was Emma Pignatel and they had two children, Mary and John. In 1852, the Macmillan list included a new translation of Plato’s Republic, Charles Kingsley’s Phaethon, F. D. Maurice’s The Prophets and Kings of the Old Testament, Butler’s sermons and Todhunter’s Differential Calculus. The bulk of their publications were still theological or educational works. Kingsley, though a historian and social reformer, was also a novelist who would, in 1863, publish with Macmillan one of the most important and imaginative novels ever written for children, The Water-Babies, but in 1854, he sent Daniel the sketch of a historical novel he was working on. It was to be a novel based on the adventures of Elizabethan pirate Amyas Preston (named Amyas Leigh in the novel), who sets sail with Sir Francis Drake, Sir Walter Raleigh and others to the New World, where they battle with the Spanish. In July, Alexander read the rough draft and wrote to Daniel, “I have been reading Kingsley’s novel and like it immensely. It is very unfinished, having large gaps with only penciled hints of what he is going to do, but it certainly has noble passages and will, I fancy, be a noble whole.”²⁹

The Macmillan brothers published Westward Ho! in 1855, and it was the first successful venture for the company into the world of what then was called belles lettres, which we would now call “commercial trade publishing.” Published at a time when Britain’s spirits needed lifting as it watched the progress of the Crimean War, it was a huge hit. It’s interesting to think that Alexander, who had been dismissed from his first bookselling job for reading novels, was instrumental in its publication. It was a landmark for Macmillan that was followed by the publication of Thomas Hughes’ Tom Brown’s School Days. These two novels provided the basis for a strong fiction line that exists on the shelves of Macmillan’s publishers up to the present day.

Alexander Macmillan

Daniel Macmillan

THE DEATH OF DANIEL MACMILLAN

The balance sheet of 1856 was one of the best that the company had ever realized up to that point. At the same time that the company was doing so well, Daniel’s health was failing, and he began to plan for his retirement. Many of their authors were solidly established, especially Charles Kingsley, whose Two Years Ago, a rush printing for the Christmas season, was another enormous success. So, with his mind satisfied that the business was on a firm footing, Daniel returned to Cambridge from his convalescence in Torquay, and the partnership was dissolved. Alexander was placed at the helm and in early 1857, Daniel’s health started to decline for the last time. On 27 June 1857, Daniel, a devout churchgoer whose questioning mind never failed him, looked from his bed through the window to the roof of St. Mary’s Church and said, “How beautiful to float up there! I am so tired, tired! Oh God, sure to deliver!”³⁰ He lost consciousness not long after and passed away surrounded by his family. With his brother’s passing, Alexander brought Daniel’s children up as his own.

LONDON

The idea of establishing a London base for the publishing house, long a wish of Alexander’s, was made real not long after Daniel’s death. A house was leased at 23 Henrietta Street, Covent Garden. Robert Bowes, his nephew, was put in charge of it. George Macmillan, Alexander’s son, wrote, “For the next five years, it was my father’s regular habit to spend each Thursday night in London, and to keep open house that evening in Henrietta Street for anyone who liked to come and take part in a modest meal followed by free and easy discussion of literary and other matters.” These evenings, called “Tobacco Parliaments,” were much like the after–four o’clock hall gatherings in Cambridge. They were held around a large, round now-famous table in one of the two open rooms. The table itself, made at Tom Hughes’ special request, still bears the autographs of Alfred Tennyson, Herbert Spencer, F. D. Maurice, T. H. Huxley, Tom Hughes, David Masson, J. J. Ludlow, Franklin Lushington, G. S. Venables, F. T. Palgrave, Llewelyn Davies, William Allingham, Coventry Patmore and Alfred Ainger. These evenings and the talk that flowed around that table played a very important feature in the development of the Macmillan publishing business since new author prospects were frequently the main topic discussed.

The Tobacco Parliament table

With the firm established in London, the list grew and gradually expanded to include poetry, science, history and travel, but Alexander wasn’t content simply to expand the list in the way that another publisher might. He wanted it to grow in size, stature and global reach. In 1863, Alexander was appointed as publisher of Oxford University and remained so until 1881. In a letter to James MacLehose dated 4 May 1863, he wrote, “I am now what you may call publisher designate to the University of Oxford. I hope it will turn out a good thing for them and for me. They have great funds, and seem willing to employ them in useful and lucrative ways. They have a good many schemes for educational and other works, and want the guidance, as to business arrangements, of a publisher of experience. I hope I will not disappoint them.”³¹ On the global side of the business, Alexander had plans to enlarge the company’s reach dramatically, and he set his sights on America.

AMERICA AND BEYOND

George Brett began working for Macmillan in 1868. It’s not clear whether he was hired with the idea of putting him in charge of the American operation, but by 1869, Brett was established in New York City at 63 Bleecker Street in what was then the heart of New York’s publishing industry. He had one man who was a packer and a boy who helped in the shop. An announcement appeared that said Macmillan had “opened an Agency in New York under the management of Mr. Geo E. Brett, by whom all their Publications and those of Oxford University Press … will in future be supplied.”³² And, with that, Alexander brought his company across the Atlantic. Canada, India and Australia were soon added, allowing Alexander to realize his vision.

THE GREAT LIST—DANIEL AND ALEXANDER MACMILLAN’S LEGACY

Daniel and Alexander Macmillan, clearly, were remarkable individuals who came from the humblest beginnings to found one of the world’s great publishing houses. They brought authors and readers together, as we do today, and the list they created from which the company grew was extraordinary by any standard. Entire books could be devoted to the Macmillan list that they developed between 1843 and 1896, but these highlights indicate the greatness of the legacy they left behind:

♦ Macmillan’s Magazine began in 1859 and was Alexander’s venture into the profitable, yet risky, world of Victorian literary periodicals.

♦ The Palgrave Golden Treasury, first appearing in 1861, was a classic compilation of poetry and short prose pieces owned and cherished by families around the globe.

♦ Goblin Market and Other Poems by Christina Rossetti was published in 1862, establishing Rossetti as one of the major poets of the Victorian age.

♦ The Statesman’s Yearbook, first published in 1864, remains one of the world’s most influential reference books.

♦ Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll’s classic work of English children’s literature, was published by Alexander Macmillan in 1865.

♦ Nature magazine began publication in 1869 in response to the public’s growing interest in science.

F. T. Palgrave

Illustration from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Sir John Tenniel

By the 1890s, Macmillan’s list grew to include the greatest authors of the day, including Matthew Arnold, Alfred Tennyson, Rudyard Kipling and Thomas Hardy. These great writers sat alongside Charles Kingsley, F. D. Maurice, T. H. Huxley and others, the entire list forming a virtual Tobacco Parliament, a feast for readers and thinkers.

AN END AND A BEGINNING

By 1888, Alexander Macmillan had given up his suburban home, named Knapdale after the Macmillan ancestral seat where they had lived since 1863, and moved his family to a country home at Bramshott Chase in Surrey. To make it easier to get to the London offices, he took a house at 21 Portland Street, London. He visited the office regularly until 1889. That year, his son Malcolm, Alexander’s eldest and the one on whom he pinned all of his hope for the future, disappeared while climbing Mount Olympus with his friend Sir Arthur Hardinge. Malcolm’s body was never found, and his disappearance dealt Alexander a blow from which he never recovered. By 1896, the company was one of the largest publishers in the world, operating in the United States, Canada, India and Australia. Alexander Macmillan passed away in the house in Portland Place on 26 January 1896, and was buried in Bramshott. The legacy he created with his brother Daniel, a legacy influenced by their grandfathers’ commitments to order, duty and progress, leavened with their own love of learning and good taste, passed into the hands of his heirs, and a new era for Macmillan began. The small seed they planted at 57 Aldersgate Street had, indeed, grown into a large and sturdy tree.

Alfred Lord Tennyson

TWO

Believing What Authors Can Bring to Readers

MACMILLAN IN THE UK

Alexander Macmillan died on 26 January 1896, at the age of seventy-seven. But the passing of the firm to a new generation had been confirmed sixteen days earlier, when Macmillan & Co became a limited company, with Frederick Macmillan as chairman. Frederick was, according to The House of Macmillan (1843–1943) by Charles Morgan (ghostwritten by Macmillan’s Thomas Mark), a man of genuine taste and some warmth, given to “impatient tantrums now and then,” but with a blind spot concerning extremes of emotion or manner. It was a shortcoming in the increasingly liberal and experimental climate of the 1890s and early twentieth century, and one shared by the long-serving editors Mowbray Morris and John Morley. Still, the firm of Macmillan did become more open to promising new writers and was about to become associated with several literary giants because of the staff’s belief in what an author, carefully encouraged and developed, can bring to a reader.

IT’S STILL A BUSINESS

Throughout the company’s history, heads of Macmillan have concerned themselves with the health of the book trade beyond the walls of their offices. Frederick, like his father and uncle, campaigned for the protection of authors’ and publishers’ rights through copyright legislation, and in the 1890s was a leading figure in the campaign for “net” books. He triggered it with a letter to the Bookseller entitled “A remedy for underselling,” arguing that many booksellers were being forced out of business as a result of the discounting policies of larger rivals, and promoting the introduction of books sold at net terms, which would prohibit booksellers from offering discounts. A number of influential publishers and booksellers disagreed, but Macmillan began publishing more and more books at net prices, starting with Professor Alfred Marshall’s Principles of Economics—a book, the firm reasoned, that every decent bookseller ought to stock. In 1899, the recently formed Associated Booksellers (now the Booksellers Association) and Publishers Association approved the Net Book Agreement. It came into force on 1 January 1900, and endured for nearly the whole of the century. There are trade insiders who look back on it with nostalgia. Frederick, appropriately, was the first Publishers Association president of the twentieth century; nine years later, he received a knighthood.

HARDY, KIPLING, WELLS AND YEATS

Be careful how you reject a writer who is clearly talented: you never know whether you may want to publish him or her in the future. This is a lesson that Alexander Macmillan can teach us. When the young Thomas Hardy submitted a manuscript entitled The Poor Man and His Lady, John Morley—Macmillan’s principal reader—rejected it, but Alexander sent the author an accompanying letter of some one thousand words, urging, “If this is your first book I think you ought to go on.” Hardy replied with the touchingly humble request: “Would you mind suggesting the sort of story you think I could do best, or any literary work I should do well to go on upon?” Charles Morgan’s comment on this exchange is, “Never has a correspondence done greater credit to author and publisher.”

Nevertheless, Macmillan turned down Hardy’s next effort, Desperate Remedies, and did not accept his third, Under the Greenwood Tree. Macmillan’s Magazine and the publishing firm published Hardy’s later The Woodlanders, but Mowbray Morris, editor of the magazine, rejected Tess of the d’Urbervilles on the grounds of what he described as the sexual “succulence” pervading the novel. Morris went on to damn Tess in an anonymous review. If Hardy ever learned the identity of this reviewer, he did not let the discovery put him off approaching Macmillan in 1902 with the suggestion that the house publish all his books. The offer was eagerly accepted. According to Hardy’s biographer Michael Millgate, Hardy remained on good terms with all the Macmillan family, and chiefly depended on Frederick for publishing advice. The author’s last visit to London, eight years before his death in 1928, was to attend the wedding of Harold Macmillan and Lady Dorothy Cavendish.

The author of The Jungle Book and Kim, Rudyard Kipling was already on the list, and remained there, while never being likely to attend his publisher’s wedding. Though perfectly civil in person, he was wary of publishers in professional matters and dealt with Macmillan largely through his agent, A. P. Watt.

H. G. Wells’ relationship with the firm was both wary and less enduring than Kipling’s. Wells joined Macmillan in 1903, and published his acclaimed novels Kipps (1905) and Tono-Bungay (1909) there. He was already unhappy with the low sales of Kipps—180 copies shifted in the year to July 1907—when Frederick turned down Ann Veronica, on the grounds that many members of the public would find this story of a New Woman “distasteful.” Despite the setback—and Macmillan’s further refusal of The New Machiavelli, as well as Wells’ comment to Frederick that, “I don’t think you advertise well, and I think you’re out of touch with the contemporary movement in literature”—Wells continued to publish with the firm, until he failed to secure the advance he wanted for Mr Britling Sees It Through (1916).

W. B. Yeats joined the list in 1916. He might have done so sixteen years earlier, but Mowbray Morris and John Morley strongly objected. “I should really at last despair of mankind if he could be [a popular poet],” Morley wrote. Perhaps Yeats never did quite qualify for that accolade, but he made a huge contribution to Macmillan, and seven years after arriving at the firm received the Nobel Prize in Literature. (Kipling had won it in 1907.) He also played a significant role in Macmillan’s publishing of its third Nobel laureate of this period, the Bengali poet, dramatist and novelist Rabindranath Tagore. Yeats selected and introduced Tagore’s Gitanjali, which Macmillan reprinted ten times in Tagore’s Nobel year, 2013; he may also have contributed a good deal of his own polish to the translations. Macmillan went on to publish all of Tagore’s works in English.

While dismissive of Yeats, John Morley—who, as well as serving Macmillan, held cabinet rank in several Liberal administrations—did make a considerable contribution to Macmillan in this period, writing a three-volume life of William Gladstone (1903) that sold more than twenty-five thousand copies in its first year and greater numbers in cheaper editions thereafter. Other notable publications of the era included A. C. Bradley’s Shakespearean Tragedy. Despite brickbats from critical rivals and the fact that Bradley became unfairly associated with the pedantic and futile question “How many children had Lady Macbeth?” his book was the most influential work of Shakespearean criticism for more than a century. Palgrave’s Dictionary of Political Economy (1894–1899) by R. H. Inglis Palgrave (brother of the Palgrave of Golden Treasury fame) was influential for even longer: it was not until 2008 that Macmillan published a successor, The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics. Frank Castle’s Logarithmic and Other Tables (1908) was another enduring title, and one of the bestselling in Macmillan’s history until electronic calculators spoiled the fun in the 1970s. After the First World War, Macmillan published John Maynard Keynes’ The Economic Consequences of the Peace, which sold sixty thousand copies in just two months. Keynes’ later works for the firm included The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936); he also acted as an advisor to Macmillan on economic texts.

ENTER HAROLD MACMILLAN

Harold Macmillan, son of Maurice Crawford Macmillan and nephew of Sir Frederick, arrived at the firm in the year of his marriage, 1920. He had served in the King’s Royal Rifles and in the Grenadier Guards during the First World War, and had been wounded three times; after the third occasion, at the Battle of the Somme in 1916, he spent the rest of the war immobilised by injuries that were to trouble him for the rest of his life. He entered Parliament as the Conservative member for Stockton-on-Tees in 1924, dividing his time between politics and publishing until, upon entering the Cabinet in 1940, giving up his Macmillan directorship. He became foreign secretary and then chancellor of the exchequer in 1955, and prime minister in 1957. Giving up the premiership in 1963 and then Parliament the following year, he returned to Macmillan as chairman for the next decade, during which time the firm published his six volumes of memoirs. At the same time, Macmillan went through a substantial restructuring. It moved out of its longtime address in St. Martin’s Street and into Little Essex Street, with the warehouse and administrative departments relocating to Basingstoke; and it was divided into trade (Macmillan London), education (Macmillan Education), journals (Macmillan Journals) and scholarly, academic and reference (Macmillan Press). Harold became Earl of Stockton and Viscount Macmillan of Ovenden in 1984, two years before his death.

Harold Macmillan

THOMAS MARK AND THE VIRTUE OF BEING PUNCTILIOUS

While Harold Macmillan had given up his directorship during the Second World War, he kept in touch with affairs at the firm via Thomas Mark. “You must also let me say what intense pride and satisfaction it gave me to have the unexpected honour of becoming a director of this famous house,” Mark wrote to him in 1944. “I hope that time will be given to me to justify my advancement and contribute my full share towards the increasing glory and prosperity of Macmillan’s.” Mark—a stout, Pickwickian man known to colleagues by surname alone—had been a key figure at Macmillan for some years, trusted entirely for his close attention to their works by authors including Hugh Walpole, W. B. Yeats, Osbert Sitwell and Rudyard Kipling. Legend has it that no error was ever discovered in a book that had carried the initials “TM” on its final galley proofs. Mark had an encyclopaedic knowledge of the firm and its list, bringing that knowledge to his ghostwriting job on The House of Macmillan (1843–1943).

In that book, he wrote—while not mentioning his own name in this context—of the gratitude for his painstaking work of Yeats, who had always struggled with spelling and punctuation. Mark offered a brief portrait of Yeats’ transformation during his Macmillan years: “Yeats was a fairly frequent visitor when he was in London, and it was interesting to notice the transformation that took place in the outer man. One saw him waiting to see Sir Frederick—sombre clothes, with black hat, eyeglasses on broad black ribbon, floppy tie, air of depression, calling up at once George Moore’s old quip about his resembling a forgotten umbrella. Later on, when he used to call on Harold M.… he was a virile cheerful figure in beautiful Irish tweeds, coloured shirt, careful tie, not aggressive in manner, but certainly not diffident, dispirited, or remote.”

The manuscripts of Hugh Walpole also required all of Mark’s famed punctiliousness. Walpole, a considerable figure in his day and the founder of the Society of Bookmen (now the Book Society), presents now a cautionary example of how evanescent literary fame can be. Mark recognised Walpole’s faults: the author wrote too fast and too prolifically, and he was subject to ill-advised enthusiasm for projects that did not suit his talents. Had not Mark intervened, a number of Walpole’s novels would have featured characters who changed in appearance and nomenclature during the course of the action. Mark seems to have had an inkling that the popularity of works such as the blockbusting historical bestseller Rogue Herries might not endure, but he pleaded, “May posterity reward his strange, complicated and yet childlike spirit!”

The adult novels of Richmal Crompton, who joined the list in 1931, had been similarly eclipsed until recently revived by Pan Macmillan’s digital imprint Bello, but her Just William stories are enduring classics and are still in copyright. Also, still popular is E. M. Delafield’s Diary of a Provincial Lady (1930), her semiautobiographical novel about an upper-middle class woman living in Devon and coping with mischievous children and an indolent husband; it spawned three sequels. Two phenomenally successful novels came out in 1933: James Hilton’s Lost Horizon, about a Tibetan utopia called Shangri-La, and A. G. Macdonell’s England, Their England, a state-of-the-nation work set during the 1920s. Three years later, via Macmillan US, came the bestselling adult novel in Macmillan’s history: Gone with the Wind. The UK company proceeded cautiously at first with Margaret Mitchell’s US Civil War epic, ordering a first print run of only three thousand copies; the reprint numbers soon went up to thirty thousand copies, and then to hundreds of thousands.

At the more heavyweight end of the list, Macmillan signed up a number of leading Irish authors in the wake of W. B. Yeats, and most notably in this period published Seán O’Casey’s Juno and the Paycock (1925), his best-known play, about a troubled family living in the tenements of Dublin just after the outbreak of the Irish Civil War. George Macmillan’s scholarly interests brought the company works that included archaeologist Sir Arthur Evans’ four-volume work The Palace of Minos, a record of his discoveries at the temple of Knossos in Crete. E. J. S. Lay’s Teaching in Practice: An Encyclopaedia of Modern Methods of Teaching in the Primary School was a series that remained in print until the 1960s. In 1932, John Cockcroft and Ernest Walton split the atom, and published their work in Macmillan’s scientific journal, Nature.

Nineteen thirty-six, the year of the abdication, saw a handing over of authority at Macmillan too, for sombre reasons. Sir Frederick died in June, having outlived his brother George and cousin Maurice by only a few months. But the third generation of publishing Macmillans, led by Maurice’s sons, Daniel de Mendi and Harold, ensured that it would continue to thrive.

RUMER GODDEN AND ENID BLYTON ENERGIZE THE LIST

Horatio (“Rache”) Lovat Dickson arrived at Macmillan in 1938, and stepped up to lead the company when Harold Macmillan gave up his directorship. Among the authors with whom Lovat Dickson was most closely associated, and among the most popular authors in Macmillan’s history, was Rumer Godden. She had already written classics that included Black Narcissus and The River when Lovat Dickson invited her to what she found, understandably, to be a somewhat intimidating lunch. Those sitting round the table were, apart from her, all men, and they included, as well as Lovat Dickson, Harold and his brother Daniel de Mendi Macmillan, along with “almost unbelievably” Graham Greene, whom she greatly admired. It turned out to be the apparently reserved Harold who, as she embarked on her Macmillan career, gave her confidence, telling her to ignore others and write what she felt, and inviting her to sales conferences. She went on to publish more than fifty books with Macmillan, starting on the children’s list with The Mousewife (1951) and on the adult list with Kingfishers Catch Fire (1953), and including The Greengage Summer (1958), filmed with Susannah York as a sixteen-year-old girl who falls in love with a jewel thief, played by a miscast Kenneth More. Godden wrote two volumes of memoirs, A Time To Dance, No Time To Weep (1987) and A House with Four Rooms (1989), in which she recalled warmly her time with Macmillan, and her delight at working with editors including Lovat Dickson, his successor Alan Maclean (more below), and children’s editor Marni Hodgkin (“halcyon days—often hilarious as they were unexpected”). She could be demanding, as when she insisted that Jean Primrose’s illustrations for Miss Happiness and Miss Flower (1961) be printed in five colours—“no five colour, no book”—was her bargaining position. Lovat Dickson gave way. Rumer Godden’s last book, Cromartie vs. the God Shiva, appeared in 1997, a year before her death at the age of ninety.

Rumer Godden may have been prolific, but not on the scale of another author on the Macmillan list. Enid Blyton wrote to Macmillan in 1940, agreeing to the publication of one of her stories in a reader for schoolchildren in Tasmania, and suggesting a series of Enid Blyton Readers. She wanted, she wrote, a “gay, colourful series not too drab or scholarly!” Macmillan fulfilled the brief by commissioning Eileen Soper, to the delight of the author, who wrote, “I really don’t think I have ever known an artist who had so obviously read each story carefully and interpreted it the way I myself would do if I could.” Blyton and Soper would work together, further, on many titles, for Macmillan and others. Although she published with several other houses, in part because no single publisher could command enough paper during the Second World War to cope with her output, Blyton wrote, “Why do I have so many publishers? Why do I not have only one, and that Macmillan’s?”

Macmillan had an unconventional editorial arrangement with Blyton, assigning her Nature readers to L. J. F. Brimble, who was the joint editor of Nature. She dealt mainly with Ronald Heath, general manager from 1914–1959. They bonded because they were both keen naturalists. After launching her Readers series, Macmillan brought out The Castle of Adventure (1944), the first of seven stories in her Adventure series starring Philip, Jack, Dinah and Lucy-Ann, which had illustrations by Stuart Tresilian. Blyton was also pleased with Tresilian, who described the series as “always good fun to do and very illustratable.” Macmillan published nearly forty titles by Blyton in all (from a total output of more than seven hundred and fifty); among the others were her Nature Readers and Bible stories.

THE MIRACULOUS IMPRINT OF A WORLD WAR I FLYING ACE

At about the time the first Adventure story came out, a World War I flying ace named Alan Bott, who in the 1920s had founded the Book Society book club, set up Pan books, intended to be a popular rival to Penguin. He wanted it to be “a really representative reprint library”—in other words, less exclusive than its famous rival; “all the leading authors and publishers” would support it, he hoped. The original Pan figure that appeared on paperbacks before 1947, summoning all these authors irresistibly, was designed by Mervyn Peake, author of the Gormenghast series. Bott, who designed the Pan logo used from 1947 on, consulted closely with Rache Lovat Dickson from the start, and Macmillan and Collins were early partners in the venture. They were joined later by Hodder & Stoughton and Heinemann. The makeup of the consortium of Pan’s owners fluctuated until, in 1969, it settled at Macmillan, Collins and Heinemann. This partnership is one reason why Pan maintained long-lasting relationships with authors who included Colin Dexter (from Macmillan), Jackie Collins (from Collins) and Wilbur Smith (from Heinemann)—though of course it was also in the days before “vertical” publishing was the norm, attracting many bestselling authors from other houses, too.

In December 1945, with paper rationing in place, it was not an ideal time to be trying to produce books for a mass audience, and Pan arrived on the market modestly: its first two titles were a special edition of A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens in hardcover and Tales of the Supernatural, a collection of stories by different authors, in paperback. The following year, Pan got permission from the board of trade to print books abroad, provided it exported half of them. So, it bought a boat from the Admiralty, and, expediently, appointed the first mate, Gordon Young, as export manager. Converted to carry cargo, the boat was christened Laloun, after a prostitute who appeared in Pan’s first numbered paperback, Ten Stories by Rudyard Kipling. Young would return from each sailing with a quarter of a million books. Seventy years later, at the age of ninety-two, he was among the guests at Foyles as Pan celebrated its seventieth birthday.

It was an exciting time, and it only got more exciting through the decades that followed, as the flair that Pan brought to its cover designs and marketing resulted in sales in the tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, and then millions. The first million-seller appeared in 1954, and it was a nonfiction work: The Dam Busters, Paul Brickhill’s account of how in May 1943 the Royal Air Force’s 617 Squadron led by Guy Gibson breached key dams in the Ruhr valley with the aid of bouncing bombs. It was made into the 1955 film of the same title starring Richard Todd as Gibson and Michael Redgrave as the inventor Barnes Wallis. Brickhill, an Australian journalist who had been a prisoner of war in Stalag Luft III, also wrote two other World War II stories made into hit films: The Great Escape, about the escape by tunnel from Stalag Luft III (Brickhill did not take part, owing to claustrophobia, and therefore survived the adventure) and Reach for the Sky, the biography of Battle of Britain ace Douglas Bader. The Dam Busters came out in April 1954 on the Great Pan list with a first print run of eighty thousand copies, and by November that year had accounted for three hundred and fifty thousand copies in print. It hit the one-million mark two years later.

“THE NAME IS BOND, JAMES BOND”

Another Pan title to eventually reach a million sales was Casino Royale (1953), in which Ian Fleming, a journalist and wartime naval intelligence officer, introduced James Bond, 007 in the Secret Intelligence Service. Fleming was a keen birdwatcher at his winter home, Goldeneye in Jamaica, and he named his hero after an American ornithologist, author of the definitive Birds of the West Indies. “I thought by God [James Bond] is the dullest name I ever heard,” he explained. Each winter at Goldeneye until his untimely death in 1964, Fleming wrote a new Bond adventure; by then, Pan’s first print runs for the novels were in seven figures, and Fleming alone was accounting for twenty percent of Pan’s annual sales of fifteen million books.

This was the year the first Golden Pans were awarded, recognising one million sales. Fleming immediately won seven of them. Paul Brickhill was another recipient. A third went to Grace Metalious, who also died in 1964, at the age of only thirty-nine. Her bestseller was Peyton Place, about scandalous goings-on in a New England town, which became a long-running television soap opera. The fourth went to a very different kind of writer, Alan Sillitoe, for Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. Sillitoe was one of an emerging group of writers from working-class backgrounds—others included Stan Barstow and David Storey along with, in the theatre, John Osborne and Arnold Wesker—producing works of unillusioned social realism. The films of their works were part of a new wave of British cinema, introducing a generation of actors such as Albert Finney, Tom Courtenay and Richard Harris.

Nineteen sixty-four was also the year of publication of the next Pan novel to sell a million copies, John le Carré’s The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, described by Graham Greene as “the best spy novel I have ever read.” According to John le Carré: The Biography by Adam Sisman (a former Macmillan editor), Pan’s advance for the novel was £1,750. By the time the publisher came to take on le Carré’s next novel, The Looking Glass War, the author’s market value had increased considerably: the advance this time was £50,000. Pan remained le Carré’s paperback publisher until the mid-eighties.

Macmillan, meanwhile, furthered its reputation for innovative and groundbreaking nonfiction, most notably in the immediate postwar years with Hugh Trevor-Roper’s The Last Days of Hitler (1947). At the end of the war, no one knew definitively whether Adolf Hitler was dead or whether, as the Soviet Union alleged, he had escaped from his Berlin bunker and was living in the West. Trevor-Roper, an intelligence officer, was assigned to investigate, and demonstrated that the dictator had taken his own life. His account of Hitler’s last ten days was much more than an intelligence report, displaying the brio that characterised all his work. He later became Regius professor of modern history at the University of Oxford.

Following its publication of the breakthrough in splitting the atom, Nature was at the heart of another great scientific discovery in 1953 when it published James Watson and Francis Crick’s account of the double helix structure of DNA. Their findings formed the basis of modern molecular biology.

ALAN MACLEAN AND MURIEL SPARK

At Macmillan, Alan Maclean became a valued figure among authors and colleagues. He had arrived at the company in 1954, at the invitation of Harold Macmillan’s son Maurice, having had to cut short his diplomatic career when his older brother, Donald, was unmasked as a Soviet spy. Alan started out as an assistant to Lovat Dickson, when Daniel de Mendi Macmillan (“Mr. Dan”) was chairman and “Mr. Harold” was performing ministerial duties. He later recalled the Macmillan building in St. Martin Street at that time as a “rabbit warren of offices, some with clerks crouched on high stools at tall ledger desks.” He became a trusted advisor to authors, including Rumer Godden, Muriel Spark, C. P. Snow and Rebecca West (“a literary volcano in almost continual eruption”), and joined the Macmillan board upon the retirement of Lovat Dickson in 1963, also serving as a director of Pan. His colleagues valued him as a kindly, urbane, witty man, who avoided office politics; he also boasted what his Guardian obituarist (he died in 2006) described as “matinee idol looks.” His short and self-deprecating memoir about his life in publishing was called No, I Tell a Lie, It Was the Tuesday—a title he had once devised as the most boring and off-putting imaginable.

Muriel Spark had won an Observer short-story competition and was a published poet when Maclean wrote to her to suggest she write a novel. “We have wondered if by any chance you have a novel in hand and, if so, whether you have already made arrangements to publish it” was how he put it. After some to-ing and fro-ing, she replied, “If I should write a novel, and find myself free to offer it to you, I shall certainly do so.” When she finally did so, he was able to offer her an advance, joking that “in the mournful event that we do not want to publish your novel, we shall lock you up in a tiny room on the top floor here and feed you on old catalogues.”

It was The Comforters (1957), in part based on her own experience of suffering hallucinations, and it received moderately favourable advance reports from C. P. Snow (“some of the writing in this book is razor-edged”) and Evelyn Waugh (“the mechanics of the hallucinations are well managed”). It was followed by a new novel each year until her breakthrough work, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961), the story of a teacher’s influence over a group of girls in Edinburgh in the 1930s. In the 1969 film version, Miss Brodie was an Academy Award–winning role for Maggie Smith. Spark, not an easy woman to please, described Maclean as “the best-liked editor in London,” and spent happy hours with him at race meetings, where they followed a horse they jointly owned. Macmillan published fourteen of Spark’s novels.

C. P. Snow was a weighty—in both senses of the word—literary figure who has since faded from prominence. Though famously self-regarding, he may have recognised that his wife, Pamela Hansford Johnson—also one of Alan Maclean’s Macmillan authors—was the more talented novelist. Snow was a former government chemist, and in a Rede Lecture at the University of Cambridge coined the phrase “The Two Cultures” to describe what he identified as a breakdown in communications between the sciences and the humanities. His best known fiction was the Strangers and Brothers sequence, set among what he described as, in another coinage, the “corridors of power”—and Corridors of Power, volume nine of the eleven, was the most successful, selling fifty thousand hardback copies upon publication shortly after the 1964 general election. Other titles in the sequence included The Masters (1951), his first for Macmillan after moving from Faber, and The New Men (1954); unusually, the James Tait Black Prize he was awarded in 1954 was in recognition for both works. On Snow’s completion of the sequence in 1970, Harold Macmillan threw a party for him at the Ritz, and wrote to him to say that it had been a privilege to have been associated with “this massive enterprise.” Snow, in reply, wrote of his gratitude to Harold: “It was through you that I came to the house of Macmillan, and your support and friendship have been more important to me than you can realise.”

One further Pan author enters the picture here: Wilbur Smith, with his debut When the Lion Feeds (1964). Smith was to remain with Pan with his Southern African–set adventure novels for more than forty-five years, during which time he sold more than one hundred and twenty million copies worldwide.

Macmillan at this point had its own paperback list, making their books accessible to students and general readers, at a time when the price of hardbacks had risen above two pounds. “Egg-head paperbacks” were how they were described, though the official imprint, with echoes of Harold’s Prime Ministerial nickname “Supermac,” was Papermac. The first was The Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III by Lewis Namier (1961). Pocket Papermacs arrived in 1964. The list fell into abeyance in the early seventies, but returned in 1979, and went through another relaunch in 1995, when the highlighted titles were Harold Bloom’s The Western Canon, Graham Robb’s Balzac, Professor Kip S. Thorne’s Black Holes & Time Warps: Einstein’s Outrageous Legacy and collectable editions of J. G. Frazer’s The Golden Bough and Humphrey Jennings’ Pandæmonium.

IN THE BUSINESS OF MURDER

Macmillan launched its Macmillan Crime imprint in 1970 with Peter Lovesey’s debut novel, Wobble to Death. Lovesey has since pursued a much-garlanded career, winning the Crime Writers’ Association’s Silver, Gold and Diamond Daggers—the last given in 2000, for a lifetime’s achievement.

Another future Diamond Dagger winner arrived at Macmillan in 1975. We have seen already that a Nature editor worked with Enid Blyton; Colin Dexter came to Macmillan through Rex Allen, a Macmillan Press academic publisher. Allen and Dexter, who had been a classics master before taking up a position at the University of Oxford, would have lunch occasionally to discuss classic textbooks. At one lunch, Dexter handed Allen a typescript: it was not a textbook, but a crime novel about a grouchy, ale-loving, crossword-solving, Wagnerphile detective. This was Last Bus to Woodstock (1975), the first Inspector Morse novel. In 1988, Morse came to television, with John Thaw as Dexter’s hero and Kevin Whately as his sidekick, Lewis; later, Lewis got his own series, and now ITV is running Endeavour, about Morse before the Dexter-Thaw era. Dexter won the Diamond Dagger in 1997, and published all his thirteen Morse novels with Macmillan. He died in 2017. Other Diamond Dagger winners who have been published by Macmillan, Pan or both include John le Carré, Dick Francis, Julian Symons, Sue Grafton, Peter James and Ann Cleeves.

С. P Snow

SONNY MEHTA AND PICADOR

At Pan, under the management of Ralph Vernon-Hunt and later Simon Master, and with the brilliant and charismatic Sonny Mehta as editorial director, these were powerhouse years for Macmillan, a period of tremendous commercial success, as well as innovative literary publishing. Mehta took the farsighted move in 1972 of launching Picador, a list characterised at first as cultish and cutting-edge but with always promotable fiction and nonfiction. In another innovative move, Mehta published Michael Herr’s Vietnam War reportage Dispatches (1977) as a paperback original—until then, and indeed for a long time after, publishers brought out all but the most down-market titles in hardback first, in part because they feared that they would not get any review coverage otherwise. But Dispatches was immediately greeted as a classic. It was some years after Picador’s arrival that other publishers—responding to factors such as the prominence of the Booker Prize, the growth of the bookselling chains and the expansion of broadsheet newspapers—brought out their own upmarket paperback imprints. (These imprints were often called “B format” lists, by contrast with “A format,” rack-sized mass-market paperbacks.) By this time, Picador already boasted a strong list of some of the rising stars of British fiction, such as Angela Carter, Julian Barnes, Salman Rushdie and Ian McEwan, as well as many leading international authors. There was, according to The Times (London), a “Picador generation.”

LEWIS CARROLL WAS ONLY THE BEGINNING

Children’s publishing has always been important at Macmillan. It was of course the publisher of Lewis Carroll’s and Rudyard Kipling’s children’s books, and later Enid Blyton and Rumer Godden. In the seventies, the firm published Robert Westall’s The Machine Gunners, which won the Carnegie Medal, the most prestigious prize in UK children’s books, and Macmillan also welcomed to the list The Great Ghost Rescue by Eva Ibbotson, whose later outstanding books included Journey to the River Sea, the story of a thirteen-year-old and her governess’s journey up the Amazon. In 1969 Macmillan introduced an innovative series of reading books called Nippers, with illustrators who included Richard Rose, Val Biro and Shirley Hughes; among the authors was a young Jacqueline Wilson, with Ricky’s Birthday. Kevin Crossley-Holland, who continues to be a distinguished author, was the children’s book editor during the sixties, and was succeeded by the revered Marni Hodgkin.

In 1979, Macmillan brought all its children’s publishing into one division, Macmillan Children’s Books, with Michael Wace as editorial director. As well as commissioning new titles, Wace looked after the backlist, reissuing Carroll’s and Kipling’s works, as well as Richmal Crompton’s Just William stories, to promote the Outlaws Club for children to join. Wace also built up the picture-book list—a strategy that continues to pay ample dividends. In 1986, Wace created the Macmillan Prize, designed to uncover talented children’s illustrators among students in art colleges, and still today the most prestigious award of its kind. Winners have included Emily Gravett, whose debut picture book Wolves (2005) won the Kate Greenaway Medal.

AS DEADLINES GO WHOOSHING BY …

An author who appeals across adult and children’s audiences is Douglas Adams. It was a Pan book, Hitch-hiker’s Guide to Europe by Ken Welsh, that first planted in him the idea for his bestselling novels. Gazing at the night sky on a youthful hitchhiking tour, he mused that there ought to be a guide to up there, too. When radio producer and novelist Simon Brett phoned him up and invited him to write a comedy science fiction series for Radio 4, that guide, The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy—which has since lost its hyphen—came to fruition. Pan published it in November 1979, and then a TV series, a stage play, a computer game and more recently a film. In 1984, it made Adams the youngest recipient to that date to receive the Golden Pan.

It was wonderful to have Adams’ sales; less wonderful to be responsible for coaxing him into producing his contracted books. Famously, he said, “I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.” As a desperate measure to get him to deliver So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish (1984), Sonny Mehta booked a suite at the Berkeley hotel, installed himself and Adams in it and did not let Adams return home until he had produced a complete typescript. Further books did follow, in spite of Adams’ dislike of solitary typing: The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy became a “trilogy in five parts” with the release of Mostly Harmless (1992), and he also wrote a series featuring “holistic detective” Dirk Gently, as well as other works.

THE EIGHTIES

The 1980s was the start of an era of accelerated conglomeration in publishing. The principal houses in London began to publish “vertically,” in hardback and paperback, meaning that an arrangement by which three rival houses owned a paperback company no longer made sense. So, in 1987, Macmillan became the sole owner of Pan. The creation of new publishing conglomerates meant that Pan’s supply of titles from imprints other than Macmillan was reduced. But it remained in a strong position. Pan and Picador, along with the Pan children’s imprints, had such impressive reputations that many authors insisted on staying with them, whatever their hardback arrangements. Others, such as Wilbur Smith, left their hardback houses in order to be published in Macmillan hardback and Pan paperback. Picador went vertical all by itself, launching its first hardbacks in 1984.

Many firms have moved beyond all recognition since the eighties. This is not the case at Macmillan and Pan. Acquisitions have broadened the company rather than radically transformed it. The US company bought the science fiction and fantasy (SFF) imprint Tor in 1986, helping to attract leading SFF authors on both sides of the Atlantic. In the same year, Sidgwick & Jackson, which had started life in 1908 and was by this time in the somewhat improbable ownership of the hotelier Lord Forte, became a Macmillan imprint. The Sidgwick acquisition and that of Boxtree ten years later enabled Macmillan to establish itself as an energetic publisher in the popular nonfiction market. Boxtree’s successes have included Crap Towns by Sam Jordison and Dan Kieran (2003), which gave the city of Hull the distinction of appearing in its chart at number one; fourteen years later, Hull was the UK City of Culture. Macmillan’s signing of a forthcoming memoir by Elton John is a legacy of the Sidgwick and Boxtree purchases. On the children’s side, Macmillan boosted its early years with illustrated publishing with the purchase of Campbell Books, whose founder was Rod Campbell, the author of the classic Dear Zoo.

At this time, Lord Stockton—Harold Macmillan’s grandson—was chairman of the company. He stepped down in 1990, and was succeeded by Nicholas “Nicky” Byam Shaw. Macmillan, which as it grew had developed an unwieldy eleven divisions, was reorganised into three. There was the newly named Pan Macmillan, comprising the general division, which had been known as Macmillan London, along with Pan and Sidgwick & Jackson; Macmillan Press, including educational, professional and reference books (Macmillan Education was later to become a division in its own right); and Macmillan Magazines. (To coincide, Macmillan general moved out of its office at Little Essex Street to join Pan at Cavaye Place in Fulham. From there, Pan Macmillan moved to Eccleston Place near Victoria in 1995, and to its current office at New Wharf Road, King’s Cross, in 2001.) The company also has a distribution business, Macmillan Distribution Ltd (MDL), so constituted in 1980. Among its biggest challenges, successfully negotiated, was handling the immediate distribution of millions of copies of the later Harry Potter novels (Bloomsbury).

THE HOLTZBRINCK FAMILY TAKES AN INTEREST

Macmillan was the last substantial UK publisher to remain under British family ownership, and it remained a family company when in 1995 the German private media company Verlagsgruppe Georg von Holtzbrinck took a controlling interest, buying a 70.81% stake. Holtzbrinck—the current chair is Stefan von Holtzbrinck—bought the remaining Macmillan family shares in 1999.

Macmillan Education grew with the acquisition in 1998 of Heinemann ELT. Among the initiatives for the division were Macmillan Open Learning, a provider of quality educational programs; the publication of Big Red Bus by Maria José Lobo and Pepita Subirá, winner of the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award for innovation in education; the MOTIVATE series (which stood for Macmillan Texts for Industrial Vocational and Technical Education); and the College Essential Histories series. In the nineties, Macmillan Education set up offices in Brazil, Hungary, Malawi, Jordan, Peru, Armenia, Lebanon, Morocco, Argentina, Uruguay and Poland.

Notable publications from the Press side of the business, which became Palgrave in 2000 and Palgrave Macmillan in 2002, included the Grove Dictionary of Art (1996), a fourteen-year project; the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (1980); the Grove Dictionary of Art Online (1999); and the New Grove Dictionary of Music Online (2000). (Both dictionaries are now with Oxford University Press.) They are examples of how Macmillan has always been at the forefront of technological developments. As early as 1992, Palgrave Macmillan Higher Education brought out three language guides with CD-ROMs to accompany them. Two years later, Macmillan created an electronic publishing unit, and in 1996, during the early part of the—admittedly short-lived—craze for general CD-ROM publishing, released The Great Green Mouse Disaster by Martin Waddell and Phillipe Dupasquier through Pixel Magic. In 1998, Macmillan Press was among the first houses to make its titles available through print-on-demand, and by 2001 was offering one thousand titles through this service.

While Pan and Picador had a history of publishing attention-grabbing titles, Macmillan held a more staid reputation. But, in 1984, when a controversial first novel came its way, no one could have published it better. Iain Banks was working as a solicitor’s clerk in London and wrote The Wasp Factory in his spare time. After sending the typescript without success to publishers, including Penguin and Cape, he dropped it off at the Macmillan office in Little Essex Street. It ended up in the slush pile of George Hardinge, who ran the crime list. Hardinge was shocked by Banks’ story of a disturbed, murderous teenager on a remote Scottish island, but could see that it had literary merit, and passed it to the editorial director James Hale. The next thing Banks knew, Hale was taking him out to lunch and offering him a world rights deal. The Wasp Factory first appeared in an ambitious print run of ten thousand copies, but soon sold out. The biographer Selina Hastings—not the obvious choice of reviewer for such a work—wrote, “Iain Banks has written one of the most brilliant first novels I have come across for some time.”

By the nineties, Picador was well established as an imprint for both hardbacks and paperbacks. It achieved its first number-one bestseller in hardback with The Beautiful Room Is Empty by Edmund White (1988), and in 1996 published its first Booker Prize winner, Last Orders by Graham Swift. Picador had been Swift’s publisher, albeit with a one-novel hiatus, since it brought out the paperback of his celebrated third novel, Waterland, short-listed for the 1983 Booker. Last Orders, about four men’s journey to Margate to scatter a man’s ashes, was filmed with Michael Caine, Helen Mirren, Bob Hoskins and Tom Courtenay.

In 1996, Picador hired the poet Don Paterson to run a new poetry list. The list included poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy, as well as Kathleen Jamie, Kate Clanchy, Jackie Kay, Clive James and Kate Tempest, among others; it has seen its poets win several Forward and T. S. Eliot Prizes, the most prestigious such prizes in the UK.

The list was broadening into other areas, too. Also in 1996, it brought out, quite modestly, Bridget Jones’s Diary, a novelisation of Helen Fielding’s Independent column about a thirtysomething, single woman in London. The novel, named British Book of the Year in 1998, went on to sell more than two million copies. There were two sequels, and three feature-film versions, before the first of which Renée Zellweger, who played Bridget, worked as an intern—her real identity unrecognised by most of her colleagues—in the Picador PR department. Bridget Jones’s Diary was often credited with launching the craze for “chick lit”—though Bridget was a little older than most of the heroines who followed her, and her creator’s prose sometimes more acerbic than that of other authors in the genre.

Macmillan Children’s Books published The Gruffalo by Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler in 1999, seven years after their first collaboration on A Squash and a Squeeze in 1992. The author and illustrator were introduced to each other by correspondence through editor Alison Green, but didn’t actually meet until the book’s launch party. Nearly twenty years on, The Gruffalo and its sequels are more popular than ever. Julia Donaldson is the highest earning author in the UK, having sold more than sixteen million books worldwide, and Axel Scheffler has become one of the most instantly recognisable illustrators. Their work has also been turned into a number of successful theatre and TV adaptations.

INNOVATION AND AWARDS

Pan Macmillan was rich in prizes for the first half of the noughties. In 2001, it had three of the six titles short-listed for the UK’s most prestigious nonfiction prize, the Samuel Johnson Prize (now the Baillie Gifford): the winner was Michael Burleigh’s The Third Reich: A New History, described in the Guardian as a book that “crackles with ideas and indignation … brilliant stuff.” The same year, the Trinidad-born V. S. Naipaul became the eighth British writer to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Picador had a new novel from him in 2001. Half a Life was about an Indian man living in London, Africa and then Germany, and hiding his past. The Nobel Committee said that Naipaul had “united perceptive narrative and incorruptible scrutiny in works that compel us to see the presence of suppressed histories.”

In 2004 and 2005, Picador titles won the Man Booker Prize, as it had become, two years in a row. Alan Hollinghurst had been short-listed once before, ten years earlier, with The Folding Star (1994); his The Line of Beauty (2004), told in intoxicating prose, was about a gay young man’s disastrous involvement with the family of a Conservative MP. It was perceptively adapted by Andrew Davies for a three-part television series. John Banville had also appeared on a previous Booker short list (The Book of Evidence, 1989), and had surprisingly not made the final six with the Picador-published The Untouchable (1997), loosely based on the career of the spy and art historian Anthony Blunt. His Booker winner The Sea (2005), as finely wrought as Hollinghurst’s novel, was about a retired art historian’s reflections on tumultuous periods in his life as he sojourned at a seaside town.

Picador also had an outstanding record at finding books that appealed both to readers of literary fiction and to those who might have been put off by that term. In 2004 Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones, the narration of a teenage girl who has been raped and murdered, was the first winner of the Best Read award as nominated by the Richard and Judy Book Club—the most effective promoter of books during the decade; the novel won a Golden Pan that year, too. Emma Donoghue’s Room (2010), told from the point of view of a five-year-old boy who has been held captive with his mother, was a Man Booker finalist, as well as a bestseller.

Palgrave published its first ebook in 2001. It was Knowledge Unplugged, McKinsey & Company’s global survey on knowledge management, and was certainly ahead of its time: not until Amazon launched the Kindle—in the US in 2007 and in the UK in 2010—did ebooks start to become mainstream. Palgrave and Macmillan were ahead of their time in more immediately rewarding ways, however. In 2009, Palgrave launched Palgrave Connect, an ebook platform that enabled libraries to take a flexible approach to building their ebook collections. In 2011, Pan Macmillan launched Bello, an imprint that makes backlist titles available (at first, it published some new writers too) in print-on-demand and digital editions. Bello, which soon struck a deal to reissue out-of-print titles represented by the Curtis Brown agency, aroused a good deal of comment at the time; now, such lists are normal publishing practice. Other Palgrave initiatives during the decade included The RSC Shakespeare: The Complete Works, which sold fifty thousand copies by the end of the year, and BFI Publishing, another collaboration with an artistic institution.

Nature, now part of the Nature Publishing Group, maintained its reputation for being at the heart of scientific progress with the publication of a special edition mapping the human genome—the complete set of instructions, for those who could read them, involved in making human beings.

Two of Pan Macmillan’s bestselling authors arrived on the list in the noughties. Jeffrey Archer came in 2002, when Macmillan published the first volume of his A Prison Diary and the novel Sons of Fortune. His hits for the company since then have included the phenomenally successful, seven-novel Clifton Chronicles sequence, which began with Only Time Will Tell in 2011 and concluded with This Was a Man in 2016. Now in the second half of his seventies, Archer betrays no sign of losing any of his extraordinary energy.

Like Jeffrey Archer, Peter James was an established author when he moved to Pan Macmillan, but, in his case, the move marked a new direction that transformed his career. Dead Simple (2005), which introduced Brighton-based Detective Superintendent Roy Grace, was the first of an annual series of novels that have sold nineteen million copies worldwide.

ANTHONY FORBES WATSON AND THE WAY FORWARD

Anthony Forbes Watson joined Macmillan as managing director (later chief executive) in 2008. He had worked at Oxford University Press, HarperCollins, Ladybird Books and then Penguin, where as CEO he had notably supported Deborah Lipstadt through a hugely risky libel action brought by the subsequently discredited historian David Irving. In the same year, Paul Baggaley arrived as publisher of Picador. These appointments, and that of Carole Tonkinson in 2014 to launch a new self-improvement and lifestyle list, have been among the key components of Pan Macmillan’s current successes.

In 2010, Pan Macmillan launched the Mantle imprint, with the highly respected Maria Rejt as publisher. Mantle has a particularly strong crime list, with novels by Scott Turow, C. J. Sansom and Andrea Camilleri, among others, and it also specialises in writers who are both bestselling and highly acclaimed, such as Kate Morton, Joanna Trollope and Kate Mosse.

It has been a momentous period in educational, academic and professional publishing, calling on Macmillan’s ability to respond to marketplace demands for ever more responsive publishing. In 2012, Palgrave announced Palgrave Pivot, which offers authors the flexibility of publishing at lengths between the journal article and the twenty-five thousand words–plus of the conventional monograph. The following year, Palgrave introduced its open access option, for Pivot publications and for monographs; its first open-access monograph, funded by the Wellcome Trust, was Fungal Disease in Britain and the United States, 1850–2000 by Aya Homei and Michael Worboys. In 2014, Macmillan Science and Education became a founding member of the Knowledge Quarter at the British Library. The other partners include the British Museum, the University of the Arts London, Digital Catapult, Wellcome Trust, the Guardian and the Aga Khan University, with the idea that they share their information, ideas, research and innovations, with widespread benefits. In 2015, Macmillan Science and Education (MSE)—including the Nature Publishing Group, Palgrave Macmillan and Macmillan Education—merged with Springer to form Springer Nature. Stefan von Holtzbrinck described the merger as “a big and exciting step into the future and a clear opportunity for all—for our customers, for our great teams in all parts of the world, for the development of the publishing houses involved and also for the family-owned Holtzbrinck Publishing Group.” By this time, the MSE companies were occupying a campus development alongside Pan Macmillan in King’s Cross, which, once a depressed area, is now a thriving hub of corporate and commercial activity.

This was a period of extraordinary achievements at Pan Macmillan. The children’s division absorbed the illustrated nonfiction imprint Kingfisher, and created an innovative new illustrated list, Two Hoots, while selling ever more copies of books by Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler. Macmillan author Chris Riddell became a particularly energetic Waterstones Children’s Laureate in 2015—it was a role that Julia Donaldson had occupied earlier. Frances Hardinge won the 2015 Costa Book of the Year with The Lie Tree—an exceptional result, because she was only the second children’s author to do so, and you could argue that she, unlike her predecessor Philip Pullman, had not enjoyed the advantage of already being well-known among an adult audience.

At the London Book Fair in 2013, Picador editor Francesca Main won a bidding war for a historical novel, The Miniaturist, by former actor and graduate of the Curtis Brown creative writing course Jessie Burton. A tale of intrigue set in Amsterdam in the seventeenth century, The Miniaturist went on to sell hundreds of thousands of copies in Picador editions, and more than one million copies worldwide.

Another auction also proved to have been worth winning. Carole Tonkinson, building a new list that now had the name Bluebird, beat seven rival houses to sign a very modern kind of personality: diet and fitness guide Joe Wicks, proprietor of an Instagram account with seventy-five thousand followers. Not all social-media stars transfer successfully to books, but Wicks did, spectacularly: his debut, Lean in 15, sold more than one million copies, and two follow-ups have also been number one hits. They are the most successful UK diet books since Nielsen BookScan’s records began.

Pan Macmillan won Publisher of the Year at the British Book Industry Awards in 2015. In 2016, Picador won Imprint of the Year. Then, in 2017, Pan Macmillan won Publisher of the Year again.

This was not a matter of a few blockbusting hits—though of course they helped. The 2017 judges, who had seen the company receive thirteen short-listings, said, “Pan Macmillan was incredibly strong in nearly every area it published into.… There’s a palpable sense of enthusiasm and energy about it.… This is a company that just keeps building and building and building.”

It was a true team effort, as Anthony Forbes Watson commented. And he also acknowledged something that has always been true: that Macmillan is not just an individual company, but part of the fabric of the wider book industry. “I’d like to thank all of our authors and illustrators for their individual brilliance, and as publishers we wear our coat of many colours with great pride,” he said. “I’d like to thank booksellers, and specifically physical booksellers for redefining their roles in our integrated world and being at the root of the confidence with which we all publish our books. We salute you.

“I’d particularly like to thank the wonderful team of people I work with. It’s been a long forty-year road for me in publishing and I have never worked with a more scintillatingly talented, creative group of people with undimmed positive belief in the future of the book and what authors can deliver.

“Lastly I’d like to thank our incredibly competitive, really smart, talented industry. Where else would I get my motivation from? We’re very grateful to everybody in the industry. Thank you for everything you have done for everyone at Pan Macmillan.”

THREE

A Land of Many Literatures and Knowledges

MACMILLAN IN INDIA

The idea of creating a branch of Macmillan in India loomed large in Alexander Macmillan’s imagination long before he actually began publishing there. Given his former life as a teacher, the way he began to think about how he might publish on the vast continent was influenced by his interest in schools and what they can do for a country and its people. In the nineteenth century, Macmillan books reached Indian readers through wholesalers and via orders presented directly to Macmillan in London. A brisk trade was conducted in this way for some time and included titles such as The Globe Shakespeare, a favorite of Alexander’s, published in 1860. The robust market for these books sparked, in Alexander, the idea of creating a series of books just for India. Using his Cambridge contacts and bookseller friends, he began soliciting information about the colleges of India, their courses of study, their yearly calendars, and so forth, but he was to find out that a place as vast as India, containing a multiplicity of cultures, would present any publisher with a challenge when it came to publishing books that could be sold across the entire continent. Alexander was to learn that India is not a place of singularity. It is a land of many literatures and knowledges and that is a fact that Macmillan India has embraced, making it one of the most vibrant publishers in India today. In the beginning, though, textbooks were the bedrock of the company’s success.

MACMILLAN SERIES OF TEXTBOOKS FOR INDIAN SCHOOLS

In 1873, W. Hullett of the Raffles Institute in Singapore wrote to Alexander asking if he would be interested in creating a series of inexpensive reading books for “the Orient.” Alexander replied, “We have in preparation of a series of Reading books and it is not at all impossible that we might work your idea into our series.” At the same time Hullett had written him, Alexander was in contact with Professor E. Roper Lethbridge of Presidency College, Calcutta. Lethbridge had written to Charles Kingsley and E. A. Freeman asking permission to use extracts from their work in a revised edition of a successful series of reading books he had co-authored with Peary Charan Sircar. The request was passed on to Macmillan and Alexander subsequently proposed a partnership with Lethbridge. The Indian series was to be the definitive set of schoolbooks catering to every need of the Indian schoolchild. The best scholars in each field were to rewrite their own textbooks in simple language that children, whose first language was not English, could understand. Lethbridge was to be the final editor/interpreter. While the series did well, the books did not transfer culturally or linguistically outside of the Bengal region.

Still, the series of Macmillan textbooks was, on the whole, successful enough to encourage Alexander to take up other series started by people like C. B. Clarke, an amateur botanist. Nothing really took hold in a major way, however, until Maurice Crawford Macmillan, Alexander’s nephew, took over the management of Indian operations in 1884 and established Macmillan India as a force in publishing on the subcontinent. Maurice spent 1885 to 1886 combining a marriage tour with a business trip through Australia and India, where he made a point of meeting many of the most influential men in the various education departments. He, too, was convinced of the potential for a successful series of books, provided the right formula could be reached. His establishment of the Colonial Library was the most successful venture by any British publisher in India, but there was more that Maurice would bring to the new branch of Macmillan. In 1885, he signed up Clifton College’s H. S. Hall, formerly of Christ College, Cambridge, and various partners such as S. R. Knight (Trinity College, Cambridge, and Marlborough College) to write a series of mathematics textbooks for Macmillan that would train many of the great mathematicians of the late nineteenth and twentieth century. While they were popular in Britain, they really took off following their adoption by Calcutta University. This success led to a long string of other successes, all of them involving Macmillan Readers tailored to the locale and age range of the students in the Indian school systems. Local publishing, clearly, was important, and in 1901, Macmillan built their first office in Bombay at 44 Hornby Road. The Calcutta office followed in 1907 and the office in Madras in 1913, the year of one of Macmillan India’s greatest successes.

RABINDRANATH TAGORE

In 1913, the focus in India changed in a monumental, though brief, way for Macmillan when they veered from the purely academic to the literary. In that year, Macmillan India published, in translation, Gitanjali, a collection of poems by the great Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore. He was the youngest son of Debendranath Tagore, a leader of the Brahmo Samaj, which was a new religious sect in nineteenth-century Bengal. He was educated at home during his early years, and at seventeen he was sent to England for formal schooling, though he did not finish his studies there. In his mature years, in addition to his multifaceted literary activities, he managed the family estates, a project which brought him into close touch with common humanity and increased his interest in social reforms. From time to time he participated in the Indian nationalist movement, though in his own non-sentimental and visionary way, and Gandhi, the political father of modern India, was his devoted friend. Tagore had early success as a writer in his native Bengal. With his translations of some of his poems he rapidly became known in the West. In fact, his fame attained a luminous height, taking him across continents on lecture tours. For the world he became the voice of India’s spiritual heritage, and for India, especially for Bengal, he became a great living institution. In 1913, the year of Macmillan’s publication of Gitanjali, Tagore became the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize for Literature.

While the spotlight was on Tagore, the company’s interest in academic publishing never wavered. Macmillan India’s catalogue of scientific works flourished through these years with the inclusion of notable books such as H. B. Dunnicliff’s works of practical chemistry, Wadia’s Geology of India, and B. L. Bhatia’s Zoology.³³

FROM INDEPENDENCE TO TODAY

For many years, through two world wars and the granting of Indian independence, Macmillan India existed as a series of branches throughout the continent, publishing for various locales and cultures and concentrating on academic publishing for schools and universities. Harold Macmillan, Chairman of Macmillan and Co. and Prime Minister of the United Kingdom between 1957 and 1963, visited the company several times, the first in 1947 during the Partition as Chairman and in 1957 as both Chairman and Prime Minister. On the latter trip, Macmillan met with Prime Minister Nehru to discuss further opportunities for the company in India.

In 1971, the first public issue of Macmillan India appeared, marking the final step towards infusing the entire company with the culture of the country. In that year, Macmillan was publishing in a dozen Indian languages and had showrooms, warehouses, and four subsidiaries in twenty-one different locations employing four thousand people. Far beyond the pan-Indian conception of the country when it was originally founded, Macmillan India was matching its books to its local markets.³⁴

Today, Pan Macmillan, founded in 1998, is one of the top five international trade publishers in India. One of the newest and fastest-growing publishers in the country today, Pan Macmillan India began full-scale publishing operations in India in August 2010 and has since published successful titles like Rabindranath Tagore’s Gitanjali and Shiv Khera’s You Can Win. Prior to this the company was distributing Pan Macmillan International titles in the Indian subcontinent along with its locally published titles under Picador India. Today, the company’s authors include V. S. Naipaul, Aravind Adiga, Ramachandra Guha, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, the Dalai Lama, Kunal Basu, Jeffrey Archer, David Baldacci, Danielle Steel, Ken Follett, Robin Cook, Douglas Adams, Alan Hollinghurst, Oliver Sacks, Oprah Winfrey, Osho, Nelson Mandela, John Kotter, Cormac McCarthy, Emma Donoghue, and Roberto Bolaño, and in its children’s list, Julia Donaldson, Meg Cabot, Rainbow Rowell, Judy Blume, Eva Ibbotson, Enid Blyton, and Andy Griffiths.

FOUR

Avid Readers, Colonial Editions, and the Emergence of a New Market

MACMILLAN IN AUSTRALIA

Imagine an industry prepared to allow exporters 50 percent more discount than local traders on value-added merchandise that has been produced by the best intellects and most creative minds of the land. Think of it. Then waiting six months for payment on indent stock held by shopkeepers in another hemisphere on the other side of the world—and then upholding these generous arrangements for well over a century. Imagine a country far from the source of this product which has been settled by people of like culture for less than a hundred years but whose citizens are already judged, on a per capita basis, to be the most avid users of the product anywhere in the world. And they, despite the expenses of production and shipping, can purchase these imports for less than their cost to people at their point of origination. We are talking about Australia, books, and the arrangements made by the great and competitive British publishing houses of the nineteenth century to guarantee that their massive output reached colonial outposts in all four corners of the world—and that it arrived promptly and regularly, and sold cheaply.

From 1843, the year the Macmillan brothers Daniel and Alexander established their publishing house, so-called colonial editions were being prepared for export by British publishers. By extending the print runs of popular series produced for the home market, publishers could reduce printing costs and maximise their trade to the ever-expanding colonial populations. They would use the printers’ run-ons, allowing the text to remain identical with the British product but adding a new title page and a statement declaring the overseas price and specifying the colonies in which the particular book could be sold. They usually had cheaper bindings adorned with minimum details, sometimes in paper rather than cloth. Another favoured binding was “colonial cloth,” a light muslin aniline-dyed in shades of dark red, green, or blue and applied over strawboard. Customers were encouraged to collect the books in series which were identified by means of their common bindings and advertised in the press and by the copious lists printed at the back of each volume.

Macmillan, whose Colonial Library dates from 1 March 1886, was not the first publisher to exploit this export trade that would identify Australians as the most avid readers in the world, but the firm did produce the greatest number of colonial titles over a much longer stretch of time—roughly from the 1880s to the 1960s.

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The year 1904 saw the opening of Macmillan’s Melbourne depot, which meant booksellers could trade directly with Macmillan rather than with wholesalers. In reality, the major trade in Australia was in textbooks, which were treated as a separate category from the colonial editions. This side of the business developed exponentially in the following decades, with massive quantities of school texts traded from the 1920s onwards.

However, up until the 1960s the local reading sector was too small to sustain an on-going publishing industry here and was still benefiting from a system that brought the latest overseas literature to Australia at exceedingly cheap rates. Then, as local publishing increased, numerous overseas publishers set up branches in Australia to compete with local publishing, and good sales of imports in Australian bookstores helped subsidise the local ventures. It was not until the late 1980s that significant sales of new books in Australia were of titles published here. Macmillan was already planning to take advantage of this new climate as it matured.

In 1966, Harold Macmillan announced that he had decided to form an Australian publishing arm, to be known as the Macmillan Company of Australia Pty Ltd. The press release read, “Australian publishing is now in a stage of rapid growth and Macmillan now think that their plans can be properly developed only through an Australian-based company.”

The company began its expansion into schools, publishing via the hugely successful On Course Mathematics series and the now-legendary Cookery the Australian Way, which to this day is possibly the single most successful textbook of all time in Australia. The 1970s saw a major thrust into secondary school publishing driven by market-leading series in science and English.

In April 1971, Mr. Brian Stonier became Managing Director. His appointment coincided with the Macmillan Company of Australia’s acquisition of 100 percent of Sun Books Pty Ltd. Macmillan then became a much larger general book publisher, bringing out hardbacks under the Macmillan imprint while Sun Books became the firm’s paperback imprint. In the meantime the educational list continued to expand at all levels—primary, secondary, and tertiary.

The Macmillan Company of Australia had in 1974 acquired the Mary Martin Bookshop Pty Ltd. Ironically, its owner, Max Harris, was to play a significant part in breaking up the traditional British market structures and copyright rules. In 1976, he attempted to secure equal access to US publications and asserted his right to buy from any source. When Australian readers saw American remaindered stock and other remarkable bargains in Mary Martin’s shops, loyalty to the traditional system quickly waned. By 1977, Mary Martin Bookshops had gone international, forming companies and opening businesses in Hong Kong and Auckland.

Sun Books was a timely venture, contributing to the changes in the social climate of the next generation. The post-Menzies era was experiencing pressures for reform that in Australia would lead to the election of the Whitlam government in December 1972. In 1974, as an aspect of growing nationalism, there was a live debate, certainly among Australian publishers, on the traditional British market and copyright issues. Sun Books and Macmillan supported Max Harris, who was an early and leading proponent of the successful move to establish Australia as its own copyright territory rather than simply an adjunct of the British Colonial market. After moving to Macmillan, Sun published another 240 titles between 1971 and 1983.

Pan Books had been incorporated in Australia in 1973 but had continued to rely solely on William Collins Pty Ltd. for sales and distribution of their UK lists into the Australian and New Zealand marketplaces. The year 1982 saw the trading terms change with William Collins and the establishment of a separate sales and marketing company.

The decision was taken in 1985 to develop a Pan Books Australian publishing list under James Fraser as Publishing Director. Macmillan at this time was enjoying considerable trade book success out of the Melbourne office. In January 1989 Macmillan General Books was incorporated into Pan Books, and Pan Macmillan Australia was launched under Ross Gibb as Managing Director.

Pan Macmillan seized the opportunity to create its own identity as an Australian publisher and success came quickly through the application of their commercial approach to marketing books. Pan Books had always been the leaders in selling large volumes of paperbacks into the Australian market. Those skills were applied to the Australian list, which resulted in significant increases in sales volumes that put the company on the map. Pan Macmillan Australia had arrived and by the 1990s was consistently challenging Penguin Books’ dominance as the leading publisher of Australian books. Authors like Di Morrissey, John Marsden, Matthew Reilly, Sara Henderson, and Tim Winton had all sold more than a million copies by the early 2000s; with Andy Griffiths, Helen Garner, Richard Flanagan, and Les Carlyon all achieving new sales records. By 2018, John Marsden sales have reached 4.4 million copies, Matthew Reilly over 4 million, and Di Morrissey over 3 million.

Pan Macmillan today is the clear leader in Australian publishing. Publisher of the Year twice in the past three years matched by record sales and profits. The Australian list boasts Australia’s highest-selling fiction writers: Liane Moriarty, Matthew Reilly, Di Morrissey, and Jane Harper. Picador continues its outstanding publishing with the literary sensations Hannah Kent and Markus Zusak. Andy Griffiths is Australia’s highest-selling children’s author, with total sales over 9 million copies and is the number one author across all categories. Non-fiction continues to be a strength, with Pan Macmillan holding 19 percent of the market, and the lifestyle list dominates the Australian market with a 67 percent market share of the top twenty titles. The company continues to be recognised by the industry. In the past year alone seventy titles have been longlisted, forty-two shortlisted, which produced twenty-one winners of publishing awards.

Publishing Director Cate Paterson, Non-fiction Director Ingrid Ohlsson, Sales Director Katie Crawford, Deputy Sales Director Maria Fassoulas, Publicity & Marketing Director Tracey Cheetham, Operations Director Praveen Naidoo, Digital Business Director Victoria Stilwell, and Finance Director Kat Lukash are the current directors of the Pan Macmillan Australia board and key drivers of the continued success of the company.

FIVE

We Chronicle the History of Our Country

MACMILLAN SOUTH AFRICA

Our local publishing history is relatively brief, but in fourteen years, Pan Macmillan South Africa has forged ahead with a number of the most influential books in the history of our country, including Nelson Mandela’s most recent memoir of his presidential years, Dare Not Linger, completed with Mandla Langa, who is an award-winning novelist.

As a result of Pan Macmillan South Africa’s acquiring the Ravan Press archives, our local publishing started in 2004, ten years after the advent of democracy. Established in 1972, Ravan Press was a significant publisher of protest and struggle literature against apartheid. Most of these books were out of print when Pan Macmillan took over the archive, and so a decision was taken to republish key titles where rights were available. Picador Africa was launched in 2004 in celebration of Africa’s literary excellence. We aim to raise awareness of the creativity and innovation of Africa’s people, and to showcase Africa’s literary prowess.

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One of the first books published by Picador Africa was I Write What I Like by Stephen Bantu Biko. This title remains in print and in demand today. I Write What I Like has sold more than eighty thousand print copies in the local market. In 2017, Pan Macmillan collaborated with the Steve Biko Foundation to commemorate the fortieth anniversary of Steve Biko’s death in detention with the release of three books: a fortieth anniversary edition of I Write What I Like; No Fears Expressed, a collection of Biko quotations; and The Testimony of Steve Biko, which contains Biko’s illuminating trial testimony given in May 1976, which had not been previously published here in his home country.

The initial titles released in 2004 were well received and soon it was time to expand our local publishing enterprise, with the Macmillan imprint being used for an additional stream of titles. The scope of our publishing remained small: we sold more than ten thousand units for the first time only in 2007, but the books being published were significant within the local publishing industry as well as the country in general.

In 2010, a full-time local publisher was brought on board with the aim of cementing our growing reputation in the South African publishing landscape. We publish between twenty and twenty-five titles per year. At least two-thirds of these titles are nonfiction, with a strong focus on biography, politics, and current affairs—the most widely read areas in our local market. Our aim is to publish books that have appeal for a broad audience and that profile influential and noteworthy South Africans and their stories.

Over the past few years this has included Trevor Noah’s bestselling memoir Born a Crime; Dikgang Moseneke’s significant and award-winning memoir My Own Liberator; Mosibudi Mangena’s moving autobiography Triumphs and Heartaches; Mtutuzeli Nyoka’s eye-opening book on cricket in South Africa, Deliberate Concealment; Kabelo Mabalane’s inspirational I Ran for My Life; Khaya Dlanga’s memoir, To Quote Myself, which was shortlisted for the Sunday Times Alan Paton Award; The Thabo Mbeki I Know, a memorable collection of essays on the country’s former president; and Ferial Haffajee’s provocative What if there were no whites in South Africa?

These books are in addition to the key backlist titles that Pan Macmillan continues to see ongoing demand for, including Winnie Madikizela-Mandela’s moving account of the time she spent in detention, 491 Days; Chris van Wyk’s humorous memoir, Shirley, Goodness & Mercy; Moeletsi Mbeki’s incisive economic and political analysis in Architects of Poverty; Mandy Wiener’s bestselling and award-winning account of South Africa’s underworld, Killing Kebble, as well as Ministry of Crime; and Njabulo S. Ndebele’s classic short story collection Fools and Other Stories.

We are also privileged to be a key partner of the Nelson Mandela Foundation. Pan Macmillan has published a range of Nelson Mandela’s books with the foundation over the past few years, including Conversations with Myself, Nelson Mandela By Himself, and the recently released Dare Not Linger: The Presidential Years.

THE LITERATURE OF SOUTH AFRICA

On the fiction side, the titles we have published range from award-winning literary fiction to highly commercial novels. Our authors include South African literary luminaries such as Achmat Dangor (Strange Pilgrimages, Bitter Fruit—which was shortlisted for the 2004 Man Booker Prize—and Dikeledi), Mandla Langa (The Lost Colours of the Chameleon—winner of the 2009 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best Book in the Africa region—and The Texture of Shadows), Nobel Laureate Nadine Gordimer (No Time Like the Present), and Njabulo S. Ndebele (Fools and Other Stories—which has sold more than forty-five thousand copies since its publication in 2006—and The Cry of Winnie Mandela).

In more recent years, Craig Higginson (Last Summer, The Landscape Painter, and The Dream House) and Steven Boykey Sidley (Entanglement, Stepping Out, and Imperfect Solo) have both won awards and been translated into French, while Angela Makholwa (with her four entertaining novels, Red Ink, The 30th Candle, Black Widow Society, and The Blessed Girl) is currently our bestselling local fiction author, and has recently been signed up by Bloomsbury in what is hopefully the start of a promising international career.

We memorably celebrated ten years of Picador Africa publishing in 2014 with a rooftop party featuring our team, authors, freelancers, and many of our bookselling partners.

Pan Macmillan has a considerably smaller team than other major trade publishers, but that doesn’t stop us from competing with the best of them. To do that successfully takes a concerted effort from every member of the company—from customer services and sales to marketing and publicity as well as publishing and finance—and it requires each person to wear multiple hats on any given day.

PICADOR AFRICA CLASSICS

As part of building our catalogue of exceptional titles, 2014 saw the launch of Picador Africa Classics, our digital-only imprint, which aims to give new life to authors and titles that may be out of print or lack presence in digital form. The imprint builds on the historical concept of something like the African Writers Series as well as a publisher such as Ravan Press, which showcased works of excellence by African writers. The titles we currently have available include Phaswane Mpe’s iconic debut novel, Welcome to Our Hillbrow, and the short story collection, Brooding Clouds; Mtutuzeli Nyoka’s evocative novel, I Speak to the Silent; and Gcina Mhlophe’s collections Stories of Africa and Our Story Magic.

In 2017, we launched the Picador Africa Heritage Series, which brings new life to our bestselling backlist titles with a distinctive series look and feel that has been greeted with acclaim. The titles include Oliver Tambo Remembered, a collection of essays on the former president of the African National Congress; 491 Days by Winnie Madikizela-Mandela; and Eight Days in September by Frank Chikane, which tells the astonishing inside story of the removal of Thabo Mbeki as South Africa’s president. In 2018, we are adding new editions of Conversations with Myself, in time for the Nelson Mandela centenary, as well as the timeless memoir Call Me Woman by Ellen Kuzwayo. These are all classic titles in South Africa’s literary landscape, which deserve to have a new lease on life in this paperback format.

When it comes to awards, Pan Macmillan and our authors have received numerous accolades over the years. In 2012, 2013, and 2015, Pan Macmillan won the South African publishing industry’s Sefika Trade Publisher of the Year Award, which is a testament to the strength of our local publishing programme.

Many of our fiction and nonfiction books have been shortlisted for various awards, but perhaps none more entertaining than the Bookseller/Diagram Prize for Oddest Title of the Year in 2014, when Are Trout South African? by Duncan Brown was a contender.

A stand-out winner is Craig Higginson, whose novels, The Landscape Painter and The Dream House, won the University of Johannesburg’s Main Prize back-to-back in 2014 and 2015, respectively. Subsequently, The Dream House has been prescribed as a high school setwork from 2019 to 2021, which will see sales running into the tens of thousands, a rare achievement in our local market.

In addition, we have seen two of our authors honoured with the Lifetime Achievement Award at the prestigious South African Literary Awards: Achmat Dangor in 2015 and Njabulo S. Ndebele in 2016.

And, in a poignant tribute, in 2016 Chris van Wyk was awarded the Posthumous Literary Award at the South African Literary Awards. Chris’s memoir, the widely acclaimed Shirley, Goodness & Mercy, was shortlisted for the 2005 Sunday Times Alan Paton Award and became a South African bestseller. The sequel, Eggs to Lay, Chickens to Hatch, was published in English and Afrikaans in 2009. In the same year, Chris also worked with illustrator Paddy Bouma to adapt and produce a children’s edition of Nelson Mandela’s story in Long Walk to Freedom, which was released in South Africa’s eleven official languages and in Portuguese. Chris sadly passed away in October 2014. In his name, we are proud to have started the Pan Macmillan Chris van Wyk Creative Writing Scholarship, an annual award that is made to a deserving postgraduate student studying creative writing at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg.

In 2017, Born a Crime by Trevor Noah won the Nielsens Booksellers’ Choice Award, and the University of Johannesburg Literary Prizes were both won by Pan Macmillan novels: The Yearning by Mohale Mashigo was awarded the debut prize and Pleasure by Nthikeng Mohlele was awarded the main prize. Both of these novels were longlisted for the Dublin International Award, and Pleasure also won the South African Literary Awards K. Sello Duiker Memorial Award. On the nonfiction side in 2017, My Own Liberator was the recipient of the Creative Non-Fiction Award at the South African Literary Awards, as well as the Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS) Award for Best Monograph in 2018.

Looking forward, Pan Macmillan South Africa is determined to keep publishing books that set us apart in the local market. If our track record and our work-in-progress schedule for 2019 and beyond are anything to go by, the future looks set to deliver award-winning and memorable titles.

SIX

A Bookshelf for the American Reader

MACMILLAN IN THE UNITED STATES

ALEXANDER MACMILLAN SETS SAIL

In 1867, Macmillan had various US distribution agreements in place with J. B. Lippincott, Scribner’s, and Pott and Amery, but Alexander Macmillan was convinced that more could be done in a market that was enormous, compared to the UK market, and filled with potential. He set sail that year on a ship called the Scotia to assess the situation for himself. At the time, there were considerable challenges to the import of British books into the United States having to do with tariff regulations, but a more important challenge was the fact that there was no reciprocal copyright agreement in place between the United States and the UK. He returned convinced that the only way Macmillan could really make inroads into the American marketplace was to establish its own “agency” there. And thus, the planning began. So as not to offend the agents he already had in place, Alexander explained to Amery and the rest, in a letter dated June 1869, that his wish was that “Macmillan would stand clear before the American public. If we are to go into it at all, we had better face it fully. If we fail—tho I have no fear—we cannot lose a great deal, and we can blame no one but ourselves.”³⁵ In July of that same year, Alexander Macmillan wrote to the Secretary of the Delegates at Oxford, who had a stake in the decision since Macmillan was distributing their books, that he had found the right man for the New York business—George Brett.

AT 63 BLEECKER STREET

George Edward Brett was born in 1829 in Kent. He worked for a time in the wholesale business of Simpkin, Marshall and Co, rising up in the counting house to a senior position when he was hired by Macmillan at the end of 1868. Within a year, Brett was set up as the head of the US agency established at 63 Bleecker Street, the center of New York City’s publishing district at the time. Brett hired a packer and a young man to look after the shop. On August 16, 1869, it was announced that Macmillan had “opened an Agency in New York, under the management of Mr. Geo. E. Brett by whom all their Publications and those of the Oxford University Press … will in future be supplied.”³⁶ Their first advertisement featured a two-volume posthumous edition of the works of the English poet Arthur Hugh Clough; Woman’s Work and Women’s Culture, edited by Josephine Butler, the English feminist and social reformer who campaigned for women’s suffrage; liberal Prime Minister William Gladstone’s Juventus Mundi: The Gods and the Men of the Heroic Age; and Speeches on Questions of Public Policy by John Bright, the English radical and liberal statesman who battled the Corn Laws and was a supporter of free trade. One can see, in this premiere advertisement, a certain focus on liberal and progressive thinking of the day. It’s interesting to note that free trade, so much favored by Bright, would be the one thing that would bedevil Macmillan in the United States well into the next century.

TRADE WARS AND PRODUCTION CHALLENGES

From the beginning the relationship between Macmillan UK and Macmillan US was fraught with problems that were not of either branch’s making. There was, at the time, a great prejudice in the United States against foreign editions of books, especially those in English. Brett wrote to the London office on March 22, 1879, “That the American publishers look upon this market as solely their own and if an English publisher chooses or dares to come and sell his own books every impediment must be placed in his way and every effort made to oust him.”³⁷ Another problem bedeviling the young company was pricing. While the American market always aimed to produce less expensive books, imported books always came with a higher price. With that being said, there was an opening for higher-priced books from a foreign source, if the quality was deemed sufficient. The third factor weighing in was the relentless way in which the New York Customs House imposed fines on English publishers who might be undervaluing their shipments to avoid the 25 percent tariff being levied on the market value of the books. Of course, the market value of disputed shipments was determined by senior members of the American book trade, allowing them to levy fees that were sure to keep British books out of the marketplace. Still, Brett persevered in the face of enormous costs, brought down the prices of the books being imported into the US market and, in return, began to see a modest success, especially in the periodicals Macmillan’s Magazine, The Practitioner, and Nature. These magazines allowed for advertisements of two books that were to establish Macmillan as one of the greatest publishers of textbooks in the United States: H. E. Roscoe’s Lessons in Elementary Chemistry and J. N. Lockyer’s Elementary Lessons in Astronomy.

In 1871, Daniel’s son Frederick Orridge Macmillan traveled to America to work as Brett’s assistant, returning to England in 1876 with his American-born wife, Georgiana Warrin. George Brett’s son, George Platt Brett, joined the firm in 1874. The first of a network of branch offices opened in Chicago and the offices of Macmillan US moved to more spacious premises at 112 Fourth Street. All the while, Brett and son were on the lookout for books that would appeal to the home market. In 1885, after an acrimonious ending with his publisher in Boston, Henry James came to the house with his novel The Bostonians and stayed with Macmillan until 1900, when he moved on, after publishing a book of short stories called The Soft Side.

In 1891, with the US office in the ascendance, there was a marked change in the communication between the two branches in that it became more formal as well as more fractious. That year, at George Platt Brett Jr.’s, George Edward Brett’s grandson, instigation, the two houses separated into two different branches with the Macmillan family retaining the lion’s share of the business, but giving Brett a partnership with a 10 percent share. The independence of the American company seemed to inject new life and vigor into the branch centered in New York.

Still, the Bretts searched on for a book that would change their fortunes. At the time, the fashion in the US was for lower-priced commercial novels appealing to the general public. The London office rejected such a venture. The obvious needling of the British branch of the company about this rejected idea can be seen in a letter Brett wrote about the success of E. P. Roe’s He Fell in Love with His Wife, published by Dodd Mead in 1886. It was a commercial novel about a farmer whose wife has died who first marries an applicant for the position of housekeeper and, then, falls in love with her. Brett wrote to the office in London, “I am afraid you rather pooh poohed my notion of a 25 cent novel, but it seems they have sold 100,000 copies on which there must … be some profit.”³⁸ Certainly, pricing came into the argument with He Fell in Love with His Wife, but it was the material, too. Brett and his son were looking for their own version of Westward Ho!, the novel by Charles Kingsley that cemented the Macmillan UK’s position as the publishers of great commercial fiction. And they found it in a novelist who shared a name, though not a bloodline, with one of Britain’s most famous statesmen.

WINSTON CHURCHILL’S RICHARD CARVEL

Winston Churchill, the novelist with no family tie to the great British statesman, was born in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1871. He graduated from the US Naval Academy in 1894 where he was an editor of The Army and Navy Journal. He resigned from the Navy to pursue a writing career. In 1895, he became the managing editor of The Cosmopolitan Magazine. He left that job in less than a year to write full time and, on June 1, 1899, published a novel with Macmillan US called Richard Carvel, a novel in the form of a memoir of an eighteenth-century gentleman set in Maryland and London during the Revolutionary War period. Just as Westward Ho! was a sensation for the Macmillan UK, so was Richard Carvel for the US office. The first edition sold out at once and was followed within weeks by second and third printings. Five hundred advance copies were sent to the UK branch followed by a further order for five hundred more. One can note a tinge of jealousy in Frederick Macmillan’s note to Brett which read that they were reacting with “surprise and envy at the ease with which you seem to sell 10,000 copies of a new novel.”

Richard Carvel established the house as a publisher to be reckoned with when it came to popular fiction. It was followed by Churchill’s next, The Third Generation, Owen Wister’s The Virginian, Gertrude Atherton’s The Conqueror, Jack London’s Children of the Frost, Mabel Wright’s The Woman Errant, and Jack London’s The Call of the Wild, a novel Brett sat up all night to read before he telegraphed his acceptance the next morning.

Throughout the period, the tension between the two branches is obvious if one reads the accumulated correspondence. Much of the tension between the two companies was based on the difficulty of selling into foreign markets. The simmering animosity forced a financial restructuring in 1928 which was to foreshadow a larger split between the companies in years to come. George Brett resigned the presidency in 1931 and was appointed chairman of the board. George Platt Brett Jr. succeeded his father as president. And the company sailed on, not knowing that a seasoned journalist in Atlanta writing at her sewing table was about to change their fortunes.

MARGARET AND HAROLD

In 1926, Margaret Mitchell, a former journalist cooped up in her Atlanta apartment with a broken ankle, began writing a novel about the American Civil War on a Remington typewriter set up on an old sewing table. She completed it in about three years, but worked on it continuously for about ten. She wrote the first chapter and, then, the rest, in no particular order, stuffing them when finished into manila envelopes. When people came to visit, she covered the table with a towel, keeping the project a secret.³⁹

Harold Latham had been hired by the Bretts as a Macmillan editor and was promoted to vice president during the financial restructuring. In April1935, he was touring the South looking for new projects. He heard that Mitchell had been working on a manuscript and asked her if he could see it, but she denied having one. When a friend commented that she was not serious enough to write a novel, Mitchell, piqued, gathered up the envelopes and took them to Latham at his hotel. The number of envelopes was so large and the pages in them so many that he had to purchase the biggest suitcase he could find just to transport it all. He read part of the manuscript on the train to New Orleans and then sent the entire thing straight on to New York. By July, Macmillan had offered Mitchell a contract. She received a $500 advance and 10 percent of the royalties. For the next several months, Mitchell revised the manuscript, cutting and rearranging chapters, confirming details, and changing the name of the main character, originally called Pansy O’Hara, to the now-iconic “Scarlett.” The title, too, was undecided until Mitchell remembered a line from a favorite poem by Ernest Dowson “I have forgot much, Cynara! Gone with the wind, / Flung roses, roses riotously with the throng.” And, with that, Gone with the Wind fully came into being.⁴⁰

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On February 26, 1936, Harold Latham wrote to the London office, “We send you a set of proofs of an important novel which we are to publish in May. It is entitled Gone with the Wind and the author is Margaret Mitchell.” Throughout the spring, the publicity department courted the Book-of-the-Month Club nomination and negotiated film rights with Selznick International all the while increasing its initial printing estimates. Gone with the Wind, priced at $3.00 per copy at the behest of Mr. Brett, going against the customary $2.50 price per copy for a novel, was published on June 30, 1936. By mid-July, the sales reached 117,000 copies. By September, the number was 526,000 copies. Brett wrote at the beginning of December, “I must confess it’s been more fun, if indeed harder work, than anything I have had to play with since I have been in the business. It has enabled us to experiment with new selling methods … and I’m afraid everyone in the Macmillan Company, your humble servant included, is feeling rather smug over our ability to put the book over as we have.”⁴¹ The publicity department, seeing the American thirst for anything Gone with the Wind, kept the sales going with a constant stream of stories placed in the press. One woman leaving New York on a boat trip to Europe found that she had received nine copies as bon voyage presents. A maiden lady in Boston who had never been south of the Hudson River started reading the novel one morning and kept at it through the night. When her Boston Transcript landed on her porch the next afternoon, she staggered to the door, looked out with bloodshot eyes, and cried, “Get out of here, you damned Yankees!”⁴²

During this heady time, the entire staff of Macmillan was indeed caught up in the giddy whirlwind created by Margaret Mitchell and her book. A young man who would later come into his own great success as a writer was working as “a minor editor,” as he put it, in a cubicle next to Mr. Brett’s office on the second floor. His name was James A. Michener, whose own Tales of the South Pacific would win the Pulitzer Prize and be made into the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical South Pacific. In the introduction to the anniversary edition of Gone with the Wind published for the seventy-fifth birthday of the author by Macmillan, Michener provides a snapshot of Miss Mitchell and her effect on the staff: “I met Miss Mitchell twice in those hectic years … I remember the awe with which word flashed through our rooms that ‘Margaret Mitchell is coming for lunch today!’ We waited with more than ordinary respect because we were aware that the generous Christmas bonuses we had been receiving were due solely to the profits she had made possible.… A secretary called out excitedly ‘Here she comes!’ And I went to my door to watch as the solemn procession, much like the marching priests in Aida, moved past. There was Mr. Brett, the young and impulsive head of our company, and Harold Latham, the stout and gracious head editor, and Alec Blanton the charismatic businessman, and Jim Putnam, the Oxford-type gentleman editor, all surrounding a very tiny woman, not five feet tall and weighing much less than a hundred pounds.”⁴³

The book went on selling, contributing a 25 percent increase in profits for 1936 and exceeding all expectations with sales of 650,000 copies of the 69-cent movie edition between December 1939 and February 1940.⁴⁴ James Michener left Macmillan when his share of the royalties from South Pacific allowed him to pursue his career as a writer.⁴⁵ And, in 2007, the characters of Margaret Mitchell’s great novel returned to Macmillan when St. Martin’s Press published Rhett Butler’s People, the second authorized novel based on Gone with the Wind, written by Donald McCaig, selling more than a half million copies.

THE SPECIAL RELATIONSHIP COMES TO AN END

Even with the great success of Gone with the Wind, tensions between the New York and London offices grew. During WWII, the scarcity of paper made it difficult to publish books as Brett would have liked. After the war, American enthusiasm boomed as did the market and Macmillan US wanted to see their books sold well internationally. As throughout the history of the two companies, the issue of selling books in different markets than those in which they were first published remained a problem. Pricing inequities, as well as the fact that the company was substantially British-owned, made it impossible for Macmillan US to do business in America under rules set down for trading by the Economic Cooperation Administration. Ultimately, though, the question of the size of the US business in relationship to that of the business in the UK caused the biggest rift. The sales in New York for 1950 totaled $13.2 million while the total for the UK side of the business was £1.89 million. The US company was, arguably, more powerful than its UK parent. Another American revolution was brewing and, in 1951, also owing to changes in UK law governing capital gains tax, the Macmillan family agreed to relinquish its majority shareholding in the US branch. Correspondence between the two companies virtually ceased in 1952 and Macmillan US operated as an independent company. Sitting in London and considering what had happened, the management of the company still hoped to be included in the American market in some way. The street where the offices of the company were housed in London was to provide the name.

MACMILLAN RETURNS TO AMERICA

In July 1952, Macmillan returned to the US with a new company under a new name, St. Martin’s Press. Named for the street on which the London offices were located, the new American branch of the company was established under the guidance of Mr. Horatio Lovat Dickson at 103 Park Avenue, at the corner of Forty-first and Park, just below Grand Central Station. Dickson arrived at Macmillan in 1938 and stepped up to lead the company when Harold Macmillan gave up his directorship. He was associated with many authors, chief among them Rumer Godden, who published more than fifty books with the company. Ian MacKenzie, a former officer in the Royal Navy and faculty member of the University of Edinburgh, was appointed to manage the New York House. There were criticisms from the employees in New York that the name made the company sound too religious, but the name remained.

At first, St. Martin’s Press existed solely to sell Macmillan and Edward Arnold titles in the United States, but between 1954 and 1955, a general publishing program was added to its remit, and that was the change that made its fortune. Just as Westward Ho! invigorated Macmillan UK and Gone with the Wind did the same for Macmillan US, Anatomy of a Murder by a Michigan judge named John Voelker, writing under the pen name Robert Traver, provided St. Martin’s Press with its first bona fide smash in 1958. A courtroom drama, Anatomy of a Murder was based on a 1952 murder trial in Big Bay, Michigan, in which the author was the defense lawyer. Anatomy of a Murder captured the American public’s reading attention and remained on the New York Times bestseller list for more than a year. In 1959, it was turned into a film directed by Otto Preminger and starring James Stewart, Lee Remick, Ben Gazzara, and George C. Scott that boosted the book’s sales further. To this day, it sells as a backlist classic on the company’s Griffin trade paperback list.

In 1959, enriched by the profits from Anatomy of Murder and finding itself with a growing staff that threatened to burst the seams of the Park Avenue offices, St. Martin’s Press moved south and west into the historic Flatiron Building on Twenty-third Street where Fifth Avenue and Broadway cross. The distinctive triangular shape of the Flatiron Building, designed by Chicago architect Daniel Burnham and built in 1902, allowed it to fill the wedge-shaped property located at the triangular intersection. The building was intended to serve as offices for the George A. Fuller Company, a major Chicago contracting firm. At 22 stories and 307 feet, the Flatiron was one of New York’s most dramatic buildings. It was such a slim building that people worried it would topple over. Though initially loathed by critics who called it “a stingy piece of pie,” it was always popular with the public. Raised to the level of American icon by Edward J. Steichen in his beautiful twilight photo from 1904, the Flatiron Building gave the young company a certain panache and has been the home of St. Martin’s Press ever since.

Macmillan, always interested in the myriad of possibilities extant in the US market, saw an opening for the company for college texts. In 1959 the board of directors proposed a college department which, in 1961, published its first two textbooks, one for freshman English and one in protozoology. Every year after that, the college division published ten to twelve books each year, providing a bedrock income for the company, but educational publishing was not all that St. Martin’s Press would become.

In 1969, a man was hired who changed the character of St. Martin’s Press from that of a small British publisher with a strong college publishing program into one of the major trade publishing houses in New York City. His name was Thomas J. McCormack. He came to St. Martin’s Press from positions at Doubleday, Harper, and New American Library. He was appointed manager of the trade division and, in the beginning, built his list on the publication of inexpensive British imports. McCormack would regularly visit agents and publishers in London looking for titles to fill the St. Martin’s list. On one momentous trip, he found several books by the same author. They were the modestly published memoirs of an English country veterinarian found in the offices of Michael Joseph, Ltd., in London. The first two were published together under a new title—All Creatures Great and Small. The author was James Herriot and his memoirs became an event in US trade publishing history. Ultimately penning an entire bookshelf of his life among the animals of North Yorkshire for the press, Herriot, more than any other author, showed St. Martin’s Press the way forward through the publication of commercially successful trade books like Silence of the Lambs by Thomas Harris, The Far Pavilions by M. M. Kaye, West with the Night by Beryl Markham, The Shell Seekers by Rosamunde Pilcher, and Randy Shilts’s groundbreaking wake-up chronicle of the AIDS epidemic, And the Band Played On.

In 1970, McCormack hired Sally Richardson to run the sub-rights department. Richardson later became publisher of St. Martin’s Press and, in 1971, Thomas Dunne joined the firm, editing bestselling authors such as Rosamunde Pilcher as well as national political figures like Senator Bernie Sanders. He founded his eponymous imprint in 1986.

In 1986, seeing the rise of science fiction’s popularity, Macmillan brought Tom Doherty and his company, Tom Doherty Associates, on board, making them part of the St. Martin’s family. Founded in 1979 with a staff of twelve, Tor books has published some of the greatest names in science fiction and fantasy: Robert Jordan, Andre Norton, Brandon Sanderson, Orson Scott Card, V. E. Schwab, and Sherrilyn Kenyon among them. Adding the Forge imprint under the editorial guidance of Tom’s daughter Linda Quinton, the imprint brought Bruce Cameron, Douglas Preston, William R. Forstchen, Patrick Taylor, Candice Fox, and many more. Starscape and Tor Teen, under Kathleen Doherty, added authors such as Susan Dennard, Kendare Blake, Jennifer Armentrout, and the middle-grade books of Bruce Cameron to Tom Doherty Associates and Macmillan.

In 1995, the upmarket Picador imprint from the UK side of the company was brought to the United States as an imprint of St. Martin’s Press with George Witte, now St. Martin’s editor-in-chief, as its editorial director. The imprint, now under FSG, publishes paperback editions of books from the range of Macmillan imprints as well as titles that originate with them directly. The Minotaur Books imprint was founded in 1999 under the aegis of St. Martin’s Press, with Andrew Martin now at the helm as publisher. Minotaur publishes one of the most prestigious mystery lists in the United States.

In the late 1990s, with the retirement of Tom McCormack, John Sargent was brought on to helm St. Martin’s Press. He is now the CEO of Macmillan. Today, St. Martin’s Press continues on its bestseller path with Jennifer Enderlin, a former St. Martin’s editor, as publisher and Sally Richardson, originally hired by McCormack to run the sub-rights department in 1970, as chairman.

THE HOLTZBRINCK FAMILY CALLS

The 1980s were a time of great movement in the publishing industry in the United States as companies merged, adding imprints and creating new conglomerates. This movement was not endemic to the United States. In Germany, the Holtzbrinck family was looking to enlarge the size and scope of its company. George-Dieter von Holtzbrinck took over the company helm from his father in 1980. At Verlagsgruppe Georg Von Holtzbrinck, the focus was increasingly placed on expanding the newspaper sector, ultimately leading to the acquisition of Die Zeit. Internationally, though, the company was interested in extending its book activities, and they did so through the acquisition of Henry Holt.

Henry Holt was born in Baltimore, Maryland, on January 3, 1840. His father owned an oyster business there. The family’s roots were in Connecticut, so when Henry was six years old, he was sent to General Russell’s school in New Haven, where he remained until he entered Yale College with the class of 1861. He wanted to be a writer, but worrying about the possibility of making a living with his pen, Holt entered Columbia Law School and graduated in 1864. The year before he graduated, however, he joined with George Palmer Putnam in issuing a sumptuously illustrated edition of Washington Irving’s The Sketch Book. A success for the Christmas 1863 season, the publication sent Holt down a different path from the one he began—the road toward becoming a publisher. Never a great success in his law practice, he met Frederick Leypoldt, a minor publisher, as he searched for someone to publish his own translation of The Man with the Broken Ear by Edmond About. On January 1, 1866, the firm of Leypoldt and Holt was born. Through the years, Henry Holt and his firm published many of the most important American authors, including Henry James, Frederick Jackson Turner, Norman Mailer, Mark Van Doren, Gloria Steinem, Dee Brown, Toni Morrison, Louise Erdrich, and Robert Frost. Sorche Nic Leodhas, a native of Youngstown, Ohio, burnished Holt’s reputation in the area of children’s publishing when her book Always Room for One More won the Caldecott Medal in 1966.

The much energized Henry Holt that exists today with Stephen Rubin as publisher began to take shape in 1985 when the Holtzbrinck family acquired the trade operation of Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Adding imprints like Metropolitan Books and expanding its adult trade imprint, the company has published some of the most important and influential bestsellers in the United States by authors such as Atul Gawande, Elizabeth Warren, Rick Atkinson, Bill O’Reilly, Hilary Mantel, Elizabeth Kolbert, and Michael Wolff.

In 1994, the Holtzbrinck company moved further into the US market with its acquisition of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, one of the United States’ most prestigious publishing companies. The company was formally founded in November 1945 at 580 Fifth Avenue in offices originally occupied by the Magazine and Book Section of the Navy Office of Public Relations headed by Lt. Roger W. Straus, Jr. Straus’s senior partner, John Farrar, had resigned from Farrar and Rinehart after a stint working on a report to the US War Department called “Psychological Warfare in the Mediterranean.” The first book published by the infant Farrar and Straus was called There Were Two Pirates. Roger Straus, many years later, recalled a review from the Chicago Sun-Times which said, in effect, that the $2.95 book should have been called There Were Three Pirates—the author and Messrs. Farrar and Straus.

Though making a clear mark in the commercial realm with Gayelord Hauser’s Look Younger, Live Longer, which sold more than 450,000 hardcover copies, and several collections of presidential speeches, the firm was also destined to publish some of the twentieth century’s most critically esteemed books, including Carlo Levi’s Christ Stopped at Eboli, Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery, and Alberto Moravia’s The Woman of Rome. When Robert Giroux arrived as editor in chief, later becoming partner and eventually chairman of the board, a long list of distinguished authors followed him, among them T.S. Eliot, Jean Stafford, Robert Lowell, John Berryman, Bernard Malamud, Flannery O’Connor, Thomas Merton, Peter Taylor, and Randall Jarrell, and the profile of the firm jelled once and for all. That impressive list continued to grow with authors like Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, John McPhee, Susan Sontag, and Tom Wolfe. Jonathan Galassi arrived at FSG in 1986 from Random House and acquired, as his first book, Scott Turow’s Presumed Innocent. After Straus became chairman in 2002, Galassi was made publisher and serves today as the company’s president.

In 1995, Holtzbrinck acquired the Macmillan Group which included St. Martin’s Press/ Tor, Nature, Macmillan Education, and Pan Macmillan. Given St. Martin’s location in the historic Flatiron Building, the various companies began to move into the building. Once occupying only about half of one floor of the Flatiron Building, Macmillan now occupies the entire building, adding a children’s division known as MCPG—Macmillan Children’s Publishing Group—an audio division known as Macmillan Audio, and two new companies, Flatiron Books and Celadon Books.

Macmillan Children’s Publishing Group has a long history as a trailblazer in children’s publishing, dating back to the founding of Macmillan 175 years ago. While Lewis Carroll’s Alice novels and Charles Kingsley’s Water Babies graced the list in the UK, the US branch of the company came upon its own classic when a woman writing about something called a tesseract knocked on the company’s door. In 1962, after receiving twenty-six rejection letters, Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time was acquired by John Farrar at Farrar, Straus and Giroux. At the time, science fiction written by women and featuring a female character was uncommon. Consequently, publication expectations were modest, but the novel was an immediate success, both critically and commercially, and it went on to win the 1963 Newbery Medal. Continuously in print since its publication, A Wrinkle in Time continues to inspire new generations of creators and remains a beloved favorite of children and adults. Nearly sixty years later, Macmillan Children’s Publishing Group continues to publish groundbreaking and widely acclaimed award-winning titles. Made up of ten imprints, including Henry Holt Books for Young Readers (the oldest) and Odd Dot (the newest), as well as Farrar, Straus and Giroux Books for Young Readers, Feiwel & Friends, First Second, Imprint, Priddy Books, Roaring Brook Press, Square Fish, and Swoon Reads, Macmillan Children’s Publishing Group publishes a wide variety of critically acclaimed and bestselling books for readers of all ages in all formats, including Tuck Everlasting; Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?; Lassie; and Shrek, as well as the modern classics Speak, Holes, A Sick Day for Amos McGee, Six of Crows, Cinder, and Wolf in the Snow by Matthew Cordell, the winner of the 2018 Caldecott Medal. Macmillan Children’s Publishing Group is also the home of a number of notable firsts in the industry: Mariko Tamaki and Jillian Tamaki’s This One Summer was the first book ever to receive both a Caldecott Honor and a Printz Award. Former National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature Gene Luen Yang’s American Born Chinese was the first graphic novel to be nominated for a National Book Award.

Audio Renaissance was founded in 1987, with St. Martin’s Press distributing its titles into the trade marketplace. The company was acquired by Holtzbrinck in 2001 and renamed Macmillan Audio in 2007. Macmillan Audio publishes audio editions of the best fiction and nonfiction books for adults and children from among the Macmillan trade publishers, and it acquires original content and titles from outside publishers as well. The Macmillan Audio list is filled with such bestselling and acclaimed authors as Mary Kay Andrews, Steve Berry, Jeffrey Eugenides, Jonathan Franzen, Jack Gantos, Kristin Hannah, Marissa Meyer, Liane Moriarty, Louise Penny, Marilynne Robinson, and Brandon Sanderson. Some of the well-known actors who have lent their voices to Macmillan Audio productions include Kate Burton, Armie Hammer, Cynthia Nixon, Gwyneth Paltrow, Mark Ruffalo, Meryl Streep, and Stanley Tucci. Authors who have narrated their own books include President Jimmy Carter, Andy Cohen, James Comey, Billy Crystal, Rob Lowe, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and Oprah Winfrey. The division has been honored with eight Grammy nominations and with numerous Earphones Awards and Audie Awards, including Audiobook of the Year.

Flatiron Books was founded in 2014 by Bob Miller, who was joined later that year by Executive Vice President and Publisher Amy Einhorn. Miller started his career at St. Martin’s Press as an editorial assistant for Tom Dunne in 1978. “That was back in the days of the telex machine which, by the way, took up a whole room on the seventeenth floor and is the place where I spent a good part of each day, negotiating offset fees,” said Bob. “I grew up at SMP from 1978–1986, becoming an editor in 1980 and publishing hundreds of books in those formative years.” Bob and Amy founded Flatiron Books with a guiding principle: publish a relatively small number of book so that each one gets as much attention from all departments as possible. To date, that strategy has paid off as Flatiron has made its mark with a number of blockbuster bestselling books by Oprah Winfrey, Vice President Joe Biden, Jenny Lawson, novelist Liane Moriarty, Factfulness author Hans Rosling, and former director of the FBI James Comey.

Founded by publishing industry veterans Jamie Raab and Deb Futter, Celadon Books selects each title with thoughtful consideration in an effort to create a list that is at once classic, uncommon, and fosters discoverability of new voices. Their list includes a wide-ranging selection of fiction and nonfiction, from page-turning thrillers and literary novels to memoirs, works of history and psychology, narrative nonfiction, and memoirs. The common denominator is that Celadon aims to publish books of quality with commercial appeal.

In 2019, Macmillan will move from one historic building to another. The company’s new home will be in the Equitable Building at 120 Broadway, designed by Ernest R. Graham and completed in 1915. Designated as a National Historic Landmark in 1978, the Equitable Building was, at the time it was built, the largest office building in the world by floor area. Moving from one historic Manhattan building to another seems the perfect way to usher in the next 175 years of Macmillan in the United States.

SEVEN

Improving Lives Through Learning

MACMILLAN LEARNING

The imprints and enterprises that make up Macmillan’s North American educational publishing group each have distinctive origin stories—stories of individuals with unique ideas for producing educational material using the latest technology, created in full awareness of what works in the classroom. What they have in common is that those ideas were realized and implemented through deep partnerships with the very people shaping contemporary education itself—leading researchers, educators, administrators, and developers—making sure those innovations would indeed improve lives through learning.

HOW MACMILLAN LEARNING WAS CREATED

Holtzbrinck first became involved in North American educational publishing with its 1986 purchase of Scientific American, which owned the science textbook publisher W.H. Freeman and Company. Holtzbrinck acquired Worth Publishers in 1993 and the college division of St. Martin’s Press in 1995 (with the purchase of Macmillan UK).

In 1999, Holtzbrinck brought the three imprints together as Scientific American/St. Martin’s Press, combining sales and operations but leaving each house free to pursue their distinct publishing approaches independently. Individually, each imprint was already well established in the educational community in their particular areas of publishing. The new organization allowed each imprint to continue doing what they did best, but with stronger support that would expand the group’s reach.

In 1998, St. Martin’s Press and Bedford Books came together to form Bedford/St. Martin’s, and the full higher education group was renamed Bedford, Freeman, and Worth Publishing Group (BFW). With this, each of the three imprints began focusing on specific academic areas: Bedford/St. Martin’s in the humanities, W.H. Freeman in the STEM disciplines, and Worth in the social sciences.

In the years that followed, Holtzbrinck moved BFW into online interactive teaching and learning by developing innovative course tools and by acquiring a number of educational technology startups. In 2011, as higher education continued to evolve, the college group was rebranded as Macmillan Higher Education, leveraging for the first time the Macmillan brand and history in the higher education space. In 2012, the higher education group joined the newly formed Macmillan Science and Education division, with the educational technology companies brought together to form Macmillan New Ventures.

In 2015, Macmillan Higher Education (which included the publishing imprints of Bedford/St. Martin’s, W.H. Freeman, and Worth Publishers) and Macmillan New Ventures (including Sapling Learning, Hayden-McNeil, iClicker, Late Nite Labs, and Skyfactor), came together to form one US higher education group, Macmillan Learning—a group that now also includes Intellus Learning and a robust Learning Science and Insights division.

OUR IMPRINTS

Whether a publishing imprint that has been around for decades, an emerging division of the company, or one of the technology enterprises formed in the twenty-first century, each member of the Macmillan Learning family has that startup beginning—a moment where individuals saw a better way to help teachers teach, students learn, and institutions serve their faculties and communities. Here, then, are our imprints in the order in which they were founded:

W.H. FREEMAN AND COMPANY—FOUNDED IN 1946

William H. Freeman was an editor at Benjamin Cummings (and a former Macmillan salesman and editor) when he came up with the idea of recruiting high-level researchers to write science textbooks. In 1946, he founded W.H. Freeman and Company in San Francisco and published as its first title General Chemistry by Nobel Laureate Linus Pauling. That pioneering text revolutionized the chemistry curriculum and set the high standard of textbook production that quickly established Freeman as a premier publisher in the sciences.

Today, W.H. Freeman has published hundreds of ground-breaking textbooks and technology products for students, boasting more textbooks by Nobel Prize–winning scientists than any other educational publisher. Pauling himself won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry (1954) and later for Peace (1962, for his efforts to ban nuclear weapons). William Freeman sold the company to Scientific American in 1964. In 1986, when Holtzbrinck purchased Scientific American, W.H. Freeman became a part of the Holtzbrinck family and relocated to New York City.

Throughout its history, Freeman has made landmark contributions to the science classroom, with beautifully produced textbooks by accomplished authors that focused on teaching students to think like scientists. With a goal of creating groundbreaking educational materials from top scientific minds, William Freeman often utilized his legendary selling skills to sign authors, and he trained his editors to do the same. In the early 1970s, Freeman editor Bruce Armbruster was intent on signing world-renowned researcher and Stanford professor Lubert Stryer to write a biochemistry textbook—as were editors from a number of competing houses. Armbruster won the intense competition by meeting Stryer at his cabin in Colorado and presenting him with a string of freshly caught trout. Lubert Stryer’s Biochemistry was published in 1975 and took the market by storm. Among its many innovations, it was the first science textbook with full-color three-dimensional molecular graphics, and Stryer was the first author to create his own illustrations via computer program. It remains a defining textbook for the biochemistry course.

In the late 1970s, Freeman began a long-running relationship with David S. Moore, a statistician from Purdue University who wanted to try something new for a statistics textbook. Rather than focus on formulas and number crunching (which calculators could handle), Moore suggested, why not teach students what statisticians actually do? Moore’s first text with Freeman, Statistics: Concepts and Controversies offered this “data analysis” approach, shifting the course emphasis from calculations to interpretation and application—a change that transformed the teaching of introductory statistics. The Moore franchise of majors and nonmajors titles continues to be a cornerstone of W.H. Freeman today.

More recently, W.H. Freeman has expanded with great success into majors and nonmajors biology, preparatory chemistry, calculus, and environmental science, in each case working with authors with distinctive voices and styles. For nonmajors biology, What Is Life? (2007) by UCLA’s Jay Phelan was the result of an unprecedented collaboration between the author, illustrator, and photo research team; while Biology for a Changing World (2012), produced in partnership with Scientific American, teaches life science through stories and infographics created in the style of the world’s most popular science magazine.

WORTH PUBLISHERS—FOUNDED IN 1966

In January 1966, Robert Worth and his colleagues Neil Patterson and Walter Meagher drew upon their varied publishing experiences to create Worth Publishers, a company dedicated to publishing a small, highly selective list of high-quality college textbooks, painstakingly developed based on the needs of students and teachers. It was, in the words of Bob Worth, “a fledgling company run by neophytes unwilling to compromise on editorial, production, or design standards.”

One of Worth’s earliest successes was Helena Curtis’s Biology—the first introductory biology textbook authored by someone who was neither a researcher nor an academic. A writer-in-residence at Rockefeller University and a prolific and highly accomplished science writer, Curtis worked at an extraordinary pace, and Worth’s sales representatives—all three of them!—began selling it nationwide. Astonishingly, the book was completed and ready to publish by January 1968 and already had adoptions in place for that spring 1968 term. When printing delays threatened the delivery date for the book, Bob Worth himself drove to the printer and loaded up a rented truck with copies. After a horrific overnight drive, featuring a dead battery, spilled kerosene, and an arrest for driving a truck on the wrong road, Worth dropped off copies of the book the next day, personally fulfilling adoptions at various colleges and universities in the New York area. Ultimately, the text sold more than 1.3 million copies and immediately established Worth Publishers as a force in the market.

With each additional publication over the following years, Worth Publishers created textbooks that would impact the teaching of a course, including Albert L. Lehninger’s Principles of Biochemistry in 1970. But perhaps no other textbook exemplifies what makes Worth unique more than Psychology by David G. Myers, a bestseller from its first edition (1986) and long the leading psychology textbook on the market (more than four million copies sold to date). A social psychologist, the author of numerous trade and educational books, and the winner of multiple teaching and research awards, Myers catalogs new research on a daily basis and takes painstaking care when thinking about what students need to know and how best to teach them through writing. Today, the Myers franchise offers bestselling titles for all kinds of students, and Myers and C. Nathan DeWall (the coauthor who joined him in 2012) are the most influential psychology textbook authors in the world.

Starting in 1998, Worth Publishers began focusing exclusively on the social sciences but continued to produce only those titles that combine impeccable content with a distinct vision for their course, such as the overwhelmingly popular series of developmental psychology books by Kathleen Stassen Berger and the market-leading abnormal psychology texts by Ronald J. Comer. Worth’s approach has made it the premier psychology publisher in the market, despite publishing only a select number of titles.

Worth also has emerged as a key publisher in economics. Long the publisher of N. Gregory Mankiw’s bestselling text Macroeconomics, Worth began expanding its economics list in the early 2000s with titles by authors who were not only accomplished educators and researchers but key contributors to public policy. Among them: Paul Krugman (2008 Nobel Laureate and New York Times columnist), who along with coauthor Robin Wells, writes a bestselling principles of economics textbook; three past chairpersons of the president’s Council of Economic Advisers (Greg Mankiw, Austan Goolsbee, and Alan Krueger), one of the architects of the Affordable Care Act ( Jonathan Gruber), and one of the leading innovators of using technology in the economics classroom, Eric Chiang.

BEDFORD/ST. MARTIN’S—FOUNDED IN 1981

In 1981, editors Charles Christensen and Joan Feinberg founded Bedford Books as an imprint of St. Martin’s Press College Division and started work on The Bedford Reader, the first of many titles that would have a defining impact on the first-year writing course. The Bedford Reader was published in 1982 and became an immediate bestseller.

Under Christensen and Feinberg, Bedford became true partners with the rhetoric and composition community, responding to their needs and priorities like no other publisher before. Bedford was an innovator in taking student writing—and students as an audience—seriously when developing its titles, making improvements in instructional design that became common practice in writing textbooks. That attention to the needs of every student became evident with the publication of Diana Hacker’s handbook for composition students. As a longtime teacher and writing center advisor, Hacker had a strong sense of what student writers needed—and what they struggled to learn. She pioneered innovations unheard-of in textbook design, including showing hand-editing of sentences, providing students with an immediate and visual understanding of the editing process. Knowing that a handbook is consistently used as a reference tool during the writing process, Hacker introduced a comb binding that let the book lie flat as a student worked, much like a cookbook. Those innovations spoke volumes to the connection Hacker had with students and instructors of writing and made A Writer’s Reference an immediate bestseller. Hacker personally class-tested her handbooks for more than thirty-five years at Prince George’s Community College in Maryland, where she was a member of the English faculty. Hacker handbooks remain the most widely adopted textbooks in America—in any discipline.

By the time St. Martin’s Press joined Holtzbrinck in 1995 (as part of the purchase of Macmillan UK), Bedford Books had established its own identity as a major force in college publishing. In 1998, the imprint was renamed Bedford/St. Martin’s, with Christensen and Feinberg appointed president and vice president. At that point, Hacker’s handbook franchise, combined with St. Martin’s handbooks from Andrea A. Lunsford, gave Bedford/St. Martin’s a dominant position in freshman comp—the one class almost every college student has to take. Bedford/St. Martin’s began publishing in history in 1992, with the launch of the Bedford Series in History and Culture, which now numbers close to one hundred titles in print. Bedford’s first US history survey developed in-house (James L. Roark et al., The American Promise) was published in 2000, with their first survey in world history (Robert W. Strayer, Ways of the World ) coming the same year.

Charles Christensen retired as president of Bedford/St. Martin’s in 2002. Joan Feinberg was president until 2012, when she was named copresident of the higher education division of Macmillan Education before retiring in 2015.

BFW HIGH SCHOOL—FOUNDED IN 2000

In 1998, it became apparent that enrollments in Advanced Placement (AP®) high school courses were growing quickly, and teachers were choosing college-level textbooks for these courses. The next year, W.H. Freeman published The Practice of Statistics, adapting David S. Moore’s bestselling college statistics books to the AP® curriculum and exam. It instantly became the number-one book in this market and remains so today, for a course whose enrollments are now more than ten times what they were in 1999. It was the beginning of Bedford, Freeman, and Worth’s emergence as a dominant force in high school publishing.

Officially launched in 2000, the Bedford, Freeman, and Worth High School group continues to publish bestselling AP® textbooks based on well-known college titles, among them Myers’ Psychology for AP®, Friedland and Relyea’s Environmental Science for AP®, James A. Henretta et al.’s America’s History for the AP® Course, and McKay et al.’s A History of Western Society Since 1300 for the AP® Course. In addition, BFW now publishes a number of highly successful original titles for AP® courses, including The Language of Composition, which dominates the largest market in the AP® curriculum and is the bestselling title on the ML high school AP® list.

Today, BFW High School has top titles in four of the five major AP® social science courses, with a much-anticipated new title in the fifth course, political science, coming in 2019. Also coming out in 2019: a breakthrough physics textbook for the second-largest AP® science course.

CUSTOM PUBLISHING

HAYDEN-MCNEIL AND CURRICULUM SOLUTIONS—FOUNDED IN 1992

Founded by Robert Olson, Hayden-McNeil is the unsurpassed leader in original content custom publishing in higher education. The dedicated team of publishing professionals has been perfecting the process for more than twenty-five years, working step-by-step with every instructor to ensure that final, delivered course materials meet their specific course objectives.

As of 2015, Hayden-McNeil’s expertise in publishing original custom print and digital products was unified with the custom publishing teams and educational content from Bedford/St. Martin’s, W.H. Freeman, and Worth Publishers to become a part of the newly formed Macmillan Learning Curriculum Solutions group.

The Macmillan Learning Curriculum Solutions team provides a one-of-a-kind suite of resources with capabilities to build from very simple to highly complex, customized course solutions—all designed to improve learning outcomes. Whether it is creating a customized version of a textbook, publishing an author’s original material, or mixing the two together, the team is uniquely poised to help educators achieve their distinct curriculum objectives.

OUR TECHNOLOGY COMPANIES

ICLICKER—FOUNDED IN 1997

In 1997, University of Illinois physicists Tim Stelzer, Mats Selen, Gary Gladding, and Benny Brown developed their own wireless radio frequency system as part of the university’s overall effort to make large introductory classes more engaging. With its simple reliable technology and focus on pedagogical content, this breakthrough technology, iClicker, made it possible for instructors to take attendance and conduct quizzes in even the largest classrooms and lecture halls, using the responses to decide which topics to emphasize.

Identified by editors at W.H. Freeman as a potential partner, Macmillan acquired iClicker in 2005, making significant investments in its hardware and software. In 2014, iClicker introduced Reef, a mobile-optimized, cloud-based classroom engagement solution that allows students to access the solution through a computer, smartphone, or tablet. With that innovation in place, iClicker won the Campus Technology Readers’ Choice Platinum Award for Student Response Systems & Classroom Engagement in 2015, 2016, and 2017.

Used in hundreds of classrooms by hundreds of thousands of students, iClicker/Reef offers more tools for instructors and more convenient active learning options for students than ever.

SAPLING LEARNING—FOUNDED IN 2005

Sapling Systems was founded in 2005 by James Caras, Ph.D., from the University of Texas at Austin, and quickly established itself as an easy-to-use online homework system with a distinctive pedagogical approach. For courses throughout the sciences as well as for economics, Sapling developed customizable content and online instruction through problem-solving practice and coaching, and gave instructors a gradebook and analytical tools to track student performance. Another innovation was pairing instructors who used Sapling with “Tech TA”—a specific support partner with a master’s or Ph.D. in the subject area and extensive training in Sapling’s systems. Today, Sapling Learning is comprised of a rare blend of professional educators, scientists, textbook authors, editors, instructional technologies experts, animators, artists, designers, and software developers. Working together, they provide students with rich, discipline-specific interactions in STEM and economics courses.

SKYFACTOR—FOUNDED IN 1993

In 1993 at their annual meeting, the Big Ten MBA Program Managers expressed a need for a benchmarking study to help ensure comparability of MBA programs across their institutions. In response, Dr. Joseph Pica and Glenn Detrick, vice president of the Graduate Management Admission Council (GMAC) founded EBI, which quickly expanded from business schools to include assessments for Student Affairs programs, nursing education, teacher education, and engineering programs. In 2003, EBI and Ball State University joined forces to create MAP-Works—which helped schools identify at-risk students and improve student success and retention rates. In 2012 EBI joined Macmillan under the new name EBI MAP-Works. Recently renamed Skyfactor, the company also offers Benchworks national benchmarking assessments in addition to its Mapworks student success and retention system. To date, Skyfactor has enhanced student development, learning, retention, and satisfaction at more than 1,500 colleges and universities.

INTELLUS LEARNING—FOUNDED IN 2011

With all of the Open Education Resources available, it’s possible to pull together an inexpensive set of materials for practically every course. But how do you help instructors, departments, and institutions navigate the OER landscape and make the most of what’s available? In 2011, David Kim founded ACE Learning to answer that question. Now called Intellus Learning, it’s the single largest collection of OER resources available, indexing more than fifty million online learning resources such as books, articles, videos, and digital content items by spanning library archives, publisher and institutional databases, as well as major open educational resource (OER) repositories.

In 2016, Intellus Learning became a part of Macmillan Learning, helping instructors and institutions match verified OER content with their course learning objectives while monitoring which resources are proving most effective in engaging and helping students.

LEARNING SCIENCE AND INSIGHTS—ESTABLISHED IN 2017

In May 2017, Macmillan Learning announced significant investments in expanding their learning research and design capabilities to drive the development of future technology products. Led by Chief Learning Officer Dr. Adam Black, the team has forged a synthesized, end-to-end approach to blending educational research, user-centered design and iterative development, data-mining and insights, and impact evaluation to drive more impactful products, instructional support, transparent results, and insights for continuous improvement. The team comprises Learning Research, User Experience, Analytics and Data, and Impact Research.

The LSI team launched a major website revealing Macmillan’s proprietary approach, published a provocative White Paper to encourage educators to demand more rigorous and transparent evidence (Unpacking the Black Box of Efficacy), partnered with industry leaders to open a new Learning Lab and Design Kitchen (in Macmillan Learning’s Austin office), and created two councils of leading experts (Impact Research Advisory Council and Learning Research Advisory Council). LSI also published rigorous educational results of instructors and institutions using Macmillan products (infographics, detailed educator studies, and technical reports).

LSI’s core belief is that instructor and institution success starts with greater student success, and they are passionate about working hand in glove with students. The first Macmillan classroom product to emerge from this effort, Achieve: Read & Practice, was released in January 2018.

CREATING SOMETHING THAT LASTS WITHIN HIGHER EDUCATION

From the outset, each company that would ultimately become a part of Macmillan Learning staked its future on the same values that have sustained Macmillan for 175 years: quality, innovation, independence, and a passion for learning and communicating the joy of discovery. Adhering to these values, each company broke through to carve out its own place in the world of educational publishing. That is why each company found a home in the Macmillan family, and why such a wide-ranging group continues to thrive, as they work toward the singular purpose of doing something new, impactful, and lasting within higher education.

EIGHT

My Macmillan Story

Of course, at Macmillan, women and men around the world add to our history, day by day, book by book, story by story. We asked our colleagues to tell us their Macmillan stories, and they provided us with a more personal look at our vibrant world. Daniel and Alexander Macmillan would be proud to see how large the tree they planted 175 years ago has grown.

Vijay Sharma, Head of Sales, Pan Macmillan India

“I reached the international airport in New Delhi eight hours before Lord Jeffrey Archer’s arrival. Post his hectic three-city tour he was still enthusiastic, charming and full of energy. It was midnight when I escorted him from domestic arrival to international departure. We reached the WHSmith store for the book signing. Lord Archer instructed me to put the signing table at the main passage, and I was worried since we were not allowed to do so. I immediately called a senior officer and requested him to permit us to have the book signing at the main passage for our VIP author, and thankfully he agreed. Lord Archer started signing copies and I still remember the glow on his face and his showman spirit, which attracted a lot of international travellers who bought multiple books, and he tirelessly signed more than two hundred copies, we managed to sell approximately 120 till 1:30 AM.”

Karen Lovell, Publicity Manager, Special Projects, Tor Books, US

“It was the fall of 1998, and I was on tour with Robert Jordan and his editor and wife, Harriet McDougal. We were in San Francisco, and our president and publisher, Tom Doherty, couldn’t get in touch with him to tell him that his latest Wheel of Time novel, The Path of Daggers, was debuting at number one on the New York Times bestseller list (the first WoT novel to hit number one). Tom asked me if I would tell Jordan and Harriet the great news when I met them at the airport the next morning. Of course I said yes! I remember running across the airport concourse when I spotted them, yelling, ‘You’re number one! You’re number one!’ We started jumping up and down in the middle of the airport and immediately started looking for a place to toast with a celebratory glass of champagne—even though it was only seven thirty in the morning.”

Daphne Sword-Fish, MPS Accounts Receivable Lead

“Back at the dawning for VHPS in 1997 we were a rather small staff. During our first Christmas holiday celebration we had a gathering held in the warehouse. Our entertainment was a hypnotist. I do not remember too many details other than there were four people who participated. One it did not work on, but the other three treated us to an extremely hilarious afternoon. I do recall laughing hysterically.”

Christine Brune, Development Manager, Macmillan Learning

“I was hired by Bob Worth in 1987 as an editorial assistant for Worth Publishers just after Myers’s Psychology first edition was published. I have worked intensively on every edition since as associate editor, development editor, senior development editor, and now development manager—social sciences. This franchise has had a huge impact on the teaching of psychology and on developing its readers into smarter thinkers and kinder, more compassionate global citizens. As the number one bestselling intro psych text for nearly thirty years, we have sold 6.8 million units. Factoring in used and shared texts, that impact broadens to at least twenty million student readers.”

Dr. Prasun Chatterjee, Editorial Director, Pan Macmillan India

“The World Book Fair in Delhi is held in the first fortnight of January every year, and it has become one of the most popular destinations for publishers from all over the world. I joined Pan Macmillan India in September 2017, and the book fair from 6 to 14 January 2018 was my first with the organization. It was amazing to see the whole team working together setting up the stall and organizing the books on the eve of the book fair. I participated along with the others in the stall to explain and show our books to the customers and also helped in selling. It was a really nice experience for a new employee in the organization. Working together through the day, interacting with customers, authors, retailers and distributors made for a fulfilling eight days of work.”

Katie Crawford, Sales Director ANZ, Pan Macmillan Australia

“In February 2011 Angus & Robertson and Borders collapsed, taking 25 percent of the Australian market with them and sending shockwaves around the trade. I will never forget picking up the phone to Ross Gibb, hand shaking, to report that the newspapers were saying that A&R had just gone broke. Things moved pretty fast from that moment as we pulled cartons off the line at MDS for what had been our biggest bookselling chain. The following months were a minefield of frustrating negotiations. Being at Pan Macmillan during this time was like being in the eye of a storm. Around us, our competitors continued to publish for a market which had disappeared, and before long they were shedding staff. Meanwhile, at Pan Macmillan, Ross maintained a steely-eyed focus on protecting our business, and under his leadership the company responded. Amidst enormous retail uncertainty, we drew on our sound position to launch a new list—Plum. From its inception in July 2011, Plum has set the standard for commercially successful, beautifully designed lifestyle books which have now contributed more than thirty million dollars in net sales.”

Roshni Sinan, Operations Director, Macmillan South Africa

“My twenty-six years of service at Pan Macmillan can be best described as awesome. A highlight I will always recall with fond memories is the time spent with authors and colleagues. I started at Pan in 1990 and have grown with the company from order clerk to operations director. Each stage along the way proved to be an invaluable learning curve, prompting the truth of the old saying that you are never too old to learn.”

Kelly Morrow, Client Relations Specialist, Macmillan Learning

“I have had many exciting moments and achievements over recent years, but my all-time favorite Macmillan story started in 2003, when rumors circulated about the long-used competitive psychology textbook book being used at the University of Alabama at Birmingham going out of print. I knew the department was going to finally be forced to change books, and I knew that there was no better replacement than Dave Myers’s Exploring Psychology. Here was the problem: No sales reps were allowed into the department chair’s office. Ever. Many times, doors had been closed in my face! But I had nothing to lose, so …

I dressed casually as a student on a day when I knew the chair would be teaching his large lecture and seated myself in the back of the hall. I took notes during the entire class period and tabbed sections in the Myers textbook relevant to the topics in his lecture. After class I approached the instructor and introduced myself as the Worth Publishing representative. His face grew bright red. He screamed at me and told me not to ever trick him again! I was devastated, but I still said as he stormed off down the hall, ‘I’m very sorry for offending you, sir, but I am a person too, and I’m just trying to do my job. I know that you have to choose a new textbook for your classes soon, and I believe with all my heart that Dave Myers’s book would be a perfect fit for your teaching style and your students. I would just love the opportunity to show you this tabbed copy and compare it to your current lecture notes.’ He did not respond. But later that evening, he sent an email saying, ‘Do NOT tell your competitors that I am emailing you or allowing you an in-person meeting! But please come to my office on Friday at 9:00 a.m.’ The meeting could not have gone any smoother. He was thoroughly impressed with the book and the amazing teaching resources. As we talked, we even discovered that I had taken his father’s world history classes when I was a student at Auburn University. (He asked if I received an A in those classes, and I was delighted to tell him that I did. That impressed him because he knew that his father was a tough personality as well.) I wouldn’t say that our relationship was ever warm and fuzzy after that, but he respected me, he respected our company and our award-winning authors and editors, and he used that package for the rest of his time at UAB. He even reached out to me years later when he moved to a university in Arizona and asked me to connect him with his Worth rep so he could order the same Myers package for his new students. It was a proud moment where hard work, persistence, and thinking outside the box were rewarded!”

Kristin Sevick, Senior Editor, Forge Books, US

“A few years ago when my son was about three, we came into the city on a weekend and visited my Flatiron office while we were here. After that, whenever anyone asked him what I do at work, he would tell them, ‘My mommy makes books in a castle.’ Anytime I’m having a tough day, I just think about how wonderful it is that I get to spend my days making books in a castle.”

Becky Anderson, Executive Digital Marketing Manager, Macmillan Learning

“When I started working for Macmillan in Boston (Bedford/St. Martin’s at the time), they were soon to hold their annual summer company picnic—Founder’s Day. I hadn’t been with the company very long when the picnic happened, so I brought a book with me to read during it in case I could find no one with whom I could chat. Naturally, about five other ‘newbies’ also arrived at the picnic with books—so we then had each other to talk to and our books to discuss. That’s when I realized I was in the right place, with ‘my people.’ And that’s been true ever since.”

Marianne van Loggerenberg, Sales Representative & Product Manager, Macmillan Children’s Books and Walker Books, Pan Macmillan South Africa

Dear Alexander and Daniel Macmillan,

I would like to thank you both for publishing Charles Kingsley’s The Water-Babies in its entirety in 1863. While this publication was only discovered by me 127 years later, at a secondhand bookstore in Pretoria, this discovery rooted my first acquaintance with Macmillan Publishers. As I was growing up to become a presumable adult, Kingsley’s concepts wove insight into my existence, and the wisdom he portrayed stayed with me through many moments in my life. I was supposed to leave my childhood behind, but I resisted this motion through literature and art and I chose to become passionate about the delicate intricacies of children’s literature and what it is that this unseen world of children’s books can offer humankind. The Water-Babies transformed me into a devoted activist for children’s literature.

In May 2008, I started working for Pan Macmillan South Africa. Since the first day of my journey with Pan as a daily companion, I still walk proudly and with gratitude through the front door of our offices. The first children’s author-illustrator I met was Emily Gravett, and the last children’s author I met was Andy Griffiths. Both of them inspired me deeply and reminded me in different ways why we are still here. At the end of the day when I walk through the front door, I remind myself to believe that the company I work for has the potential to change lives. When I started working at Pan Macmillan South Africa, I was a Gruffalo, and now, ten years later, I have turned into a Moomin.

Charles Kingsley wrote 155 years ago in The Water-Babies: “The most wonderful and the strongest things in the world, you know, are just the things which no one can see.” Today, I say, this is also true about the actual work that we do.

Congratulations, and may your vision outlive us all.

Yours sincerely,

Ms Marianne van Loggerenberg

Amelie Littell, Senior Executive Managing Editor, St. Martin’s Press, US

“The day that I knew I had made the right decision to work at St. Martin’s Press came very shortly after I arrived in February 1982, when the managing editor brought me into an empty office, showed me a box on the floor, and asked me to take care of it. Inside the box was a biography of Isak Dinesen by Judith Thurman. I went right to work, read a few pages, and called the editor, Michael Denneny. I told Michael that this book would win the National Book Award, which was a very strange thing for me to do. He said, ‘Don’t say that, you’ll jinx it!’ Well, I didn’t jinx it. Judith Thurman’s Isak Dinesen did win the National Book Award in 1983.

The day I wondered if I had made the right decision came when the doors of the Flatiron Building’s formerly hydraulic elevator system opened and I saw someone holding an open umbrella. It was raining inside the elevator.”

Andrea Nattrass, Publisher, Pan Macmillan South Africa

“I started working for Pan Macmillan South Africa as a freelance editor in 2004. The first time I met Terry Morris, who was then Pan’s publisher, she forgot where she had parked her car in the airport parking lot and we spent a good fifteen minutes locating it.

Terry and I have had many memorable moments with authors over the years, but one that stands out is our December 2016 airport rendezvous in Johannesburg with Thuli Madonsela (South Africa’s former public protector, recognised as a global leader in the pursuit of good governance and justice). We were due to meet Thuli for her to sign the publishing agreement for her memoir before she boarded a plane for New York, a meeting that had already been postponed three times because of Thuli’s pressing commitments. On this occasion, Thuli was delayed in arriving to check in for her flight, and instead of a leisurely meeting, Terry and I ended up literally standing with Thuli at the check-in desk, explaining various clauses and signing and witnessing the publishing agreement before she was given a special escort to the plane because she was so late for boarding.”

George Morley, Editorial Director, Picador UK

“One of my favourite moments has been a recent book we published with the Nelson Mandela Foundation, Dare Not Linger, going out to the archive in South Africa and holding Mandela’s writing in my hand. And seeing the book out in the world, that’s pretty amazing.”

Charles Spicer, Vice President, Executive Editor, St. Martin’s Press, US

“I’ve worked at Macmillan for more than thirty years. One of my fondest memories is of a tradition begun by our beloved late co-publisher Matthew Shear called ‘The Wednesday Night Bestseller Drink.’ Each Wednesday, after the New York Times bestseller list had landed in the publicity department, we would repair across the street to our favorite watering hole, a place called Bolo. If you’d had a triumph, Matthew would greet you with his wonderful, booming laugh and propose a toast. If you’d gone down to defeat, he’d buy you a round to buck you up and send you back into the fray. As you headed home that evening, you might not know whether the next week would bring a victory, but you were very sure of one thing: you worked at the best place on earth with the finest colleagues in the world.”

Cate Paterson, Publishing Director, Pan Macmillan Australia

“In March 2014 a much-loved colleague, Kathie Muir, who started working with Pan Macmillan as part of the finance team, was diagnosed with Motor Neurone Disease. She loved working in ‘Paradise,’ as the recently retired finance director referred to the office. Kathie kept her spirits up all through this difficult time as she required crutches, then a wheelchair. But in June 2014, after just shy of twelve years, she made the decision that she could no longer come to the office. During 2015, her condition deteriorated and we could see that the family would be faced with enormous medical bills once Kathie had to be moved into a nursing home and her husband needed to take time away from work. With no hesitation, the company mobilised, led by Siv Toigo and our MD, Ross Gibb, and organised by Judy Frewen. We put together a raffle to raise funds. Every staff member put up their hand to sell raffle tickets and we sold hundreds to family, friends, and third parties, and some of our authors were the most generous buyers. People volunteered prizes, and in the end the raffle raised more than thirty thousand dollars. Along with some other items we auctioned, including a signed copy of Matt Reilly’s self-published novel Contest, which sold for four thousand dollars, and the company donating five thousand dollars for the first prize, we raised a total of forty-five thousand dollars. The Muir family were able to make Kathie’s last few months as comfortable as possible and the rest of the money was put towards the future needs of Kathie’s two children. Kathie died in December 2015. We miss her greatly.”

Andrea Cava, Senior Manager of Publishing, Macmillan Learning

“Something odd and curious happened in 2015 during Bedford/St. Martin’s production of Shelley’s Frankenstein. The project editor packaged and mailed the original manuscript to the copy editor, but days and then weeks went by with no sign of the manuscript. UPS could find no evidence that the package was ever in their system. After much follow-up, we learned from UPS that they believed the package was at their Pennsylvania hub without a label on it. The original manuscript was never recovered. The airbill, which the project editor had inserted into a clear pouch that she taped closed and securely affixed to the shipping box, was somehow removed and placed in the airbill pouch on a different box. How do we know this? Well, the other box got delivered to the copy editor. No big deal, right? But when the copy editor opened the box, she found a man’s black suit, with a size fifty-inch jacket and forty-five-inch-waist pants—something Frankenstein’s monster would wear! If you don’t believe in coincidences, perhaps this recounting gave you pause, or even a momentary chill.”

George Witte, Editor in Chief, St. Martin’s Press, US

“I began at St. Martin’s Press in October 1984, encumbered with a degree in English that seemed to promise unemployment. My job was editorial assistant to Tom McCormack, the CEO, publisher, and editorial director of the company—which I soon came to understand was the best entry-level job in publishing.

Formidably intelligent about books and nimble with numbers, Tom was a teacher, mentor, interlocutor, and editor. He paid an astonishing level of attention to the line-by-line, paragraph-by-paragraph, scene-by-scene writing of commercial fiction. The word scrutiny suggests but does not capture the work he did on books. When I think of that work, meticulously done on evenings and weekends, on top of reading each week’s slippery haul of manuscripts and proposals and doing budgets and dealing with a thousand details and, oh, running a small company with a unique business model on a very thin edge, I marvel that Tom had any time left to mentor.

But he did, and each week conveyed a group of younger assistants, associate editors, and editors to discuss what they had read that week, as well as talk through the business of publishing. So many of us who worked for him, directly or indirectly, grew into editors and publishers ourselves, and while our business has changed dramatically over three decades, Tom’s insights into editing and numbers still hold true.

St. Martin’s felt like a family then, with the eccentricities and personalities of every family. Joan Kahn, the daunting crime fiction editor, clouds of black cigarillo smoke boiling from her office as she tore the hide from a hapless agent who called her to request an acceptance payment (those were the days!). Lincoln Child, elegantly attired in suit and bow tie, who worked closely with Tom, was a good-humored and generous mentor, and after leaving St. Martin’s went on to become a bestselling author. Tom Dunne and Hope Dellon, then as now honest and opinionated and wide-ranging in their interests, who discovered some of St. Martin’s biggest authors, among them Rosamunde Pilcher and Margaret George. Michael Denneny, the intuitive and brave editor who founded Stonewall Editions, the first major publishing imprint for books aimed at the gay community, and edited wildly different landmark books, from And the Band Played On by Randy Shilts to Will by G. Gordon Liddy. Sally Richardson, then the director of subsidiary rights, who became our publisher and is now our chairman, whose optimism and clarity brought light to every day, and who founded from scratch our mass market and trade paperback publishing programs, which drove the company’s dramatic growth. Phil Schwartz, our CFO, whose stop-in-the-doorway advice to me during a difficult time (‘Opportunities don’t come along very often, and you should say yes to them’) made a difference in my career. Helen Plog, our office manager, glamorous in a way that recalled classic movies, who presided over pretty much everything that kept the place running, the photocopy machines filled with paper, and the lights turned on.

I am starting to sound like one of those people who talks too long at a funeral. I’ve seen SMP molt through many changes during my decades here, from the little company that could to a powerhouse. Congratulations to Macmillan on its 175th anniversary; I am proud to have played a small part in its continuing success.”

Alexandra Cenni, Sales Support Associate, Macmillan Learning

“I grew up in love with Macmillan fiction. My father was a big fan of many of the science fiction authors, but I found a love of fantasy through the works of Pamela Dean, Juliet Marillier, and Elizabeth Kerner. Infamously, as a middle school student, I declared to my language arts teacher that I would one day work for Macmillan (he scoffed at me). It was a tad foolish; I thought all publishing folk did was read all day, and I can assure you, I had that down long before I was old enough to see over the library counter. The day I started working at our office I was bouncing with so much energy I arrived an hour early for my day. When I told my family about the company I would be working for they all rolled their eyes and said it was inevitable. What more could a BookDragon like me ask for?”

Rochelle Samuels, Customer Services, Pan Macmillan South Africa

“When I started at Pan Macmillan in 2008, I didn’t have the faintest idea as to what publishing was about. I was not used to reading at all, or even thought of picking up a book to read. Working for a publishing company and having so many amazing books at my disposal, I felt like a child at a candy store.”

Marc Edwards, Senior Sales Representative, Macmillan Learning

“I think back to the time in 1984 when I first started my career in publishing. There were no laptops or cell phones; reps had to fill out forms and mail them to New York in order to have books sampled to faculty. If you needed to contact someone in the New York office you had to use a pay phone and company phone credit card. Because answering systems didn’t exist you couldn’t leave a message if that person wasn’t in, so you had to go down the list of names and call until someone answered so you could leave a message. When we closed an adoption we provided the faculty with a printed instructor’s manual that included test questions and transparency masters. How times have changed.”

Sherry Neville, Adult Product Manager, Pan Macmillan South Africa

“My journey with Pan Macmillan started long before my first official day working there. Being employed by Macmillan Education South Africa for eleven years before joining Pan in July last year, I shared office space with my ‘now’ Pan colleagues. From conversations in the kitchen about books and life to frantic calls to Graham regarding submitting books to the Department of Education, I have loved my interactions with the Pan team. Now that I’m part of ‘the family,’ the conversations in the kitchen about books and life haven’t stopped, but luckily the frantic calls to Graham have.”

Rodney Williams, Senior Mail Clerk, Special Operations,
Macmillan Publishers, US

“The first time I met John Sargent was during the blackout in 2003—he had come to the old Holt office at Eighteenth Street to check on us. Everyone else had gone home at the time, but I lived too far away to walk, so I had stayed behind. Despite the lack of electricity, I had decided to continue my rounds, so when he found me, I was rolling my cart around the windowless part of the office with a flashlight, making deliveries—work doesn’t stop just because of a blackout!”

Jonathan Galassi, President and Publisher, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, US

“In 1987, a young assistant in the office of Phyllis Wender, an agent who was primarily interested in theater, called me and said, with a certain solemnity, ‘I really think you should read this book.’ Her name was Susan Golomb, and the book, the first she had ever represented, had been written, I later learned, by the son-in-law of one of Phyllis’s friends. The Twenty-Seventh City was by a twenty-seven-year old graduate of Swarthmore from St. Louis, at that time the twenty-seventh-largest city in the United States. Jonathan Franzen had spent the last five years working in a science laboratory at Harvard University by day and writing his novel by night and on weekends.

I took the long manuscript home, set it on my bedside table, and read it over the next days. It was about St. Louis’s Sikh police chief, a woman named S. Jammu, who stages a takeover of the government of the city. It was a cool, insightful, if a bit unforgiving, with a large cast of brilliantly realized characters, and an unforgettably complex and moving social vision. As I neared the climactic point of the book I found my anxiety rising, as it often does when I read something new and unexpected. My worry had to do with my fear that the writer was going to take a wrong turn and ruin his book. He didn’t, though. Franzen had stayed the course of his remarkable creation—and the rest is history. Soon enough we had bought the book, for an advance of twenty thousand dollars, as I recall. I remember saying to Jonathan at our first lunch, ‘You have everything it takes to be a great writer.’ That was more than thirty years ago, and we’ve been working together ever since. For once, I was right.”

Praveen Naidoo, Program Director, Pan Macmillan Australia

“One of my greatest memories of my time at Macmillan was the celebration in Sydney for our staff after receiving the Publisher of the Year Award in 2015. Looking around that room, there was a definite feeling that we as a group had managed to not only survive but also thrive in the face of adversity. To have that recognized by our industry was extremely satisfying but, even more important, it reminded me of just how much fun we had actually had along the way, and that absolutely everybody’s contribution was acknowledged when it came to celebrating our successes. To me, that speaks to the heart of the Pan Macmillan culture.”

Jen Sano, Technical Product Specialist, Macmillan Learning

“My first day on campus as a rep was at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. I was working with our fearless trainer, Doug Bolton. We saw an amazing twenty-two people that day! As the day progressed, we followed the campus map looking for portable office buildings that housed the overflow of instructors. The map showed the buildings but not the wall that stood between us. It wasn’t too high of a wall—maybe four feet. It was a long wall, though. We could not see the immediate end of the wall in either direction. I looked at my trainer and asked, ‘Do we go around it?’ He asked me for my book bag. Without thinking, I handed it to him, and he tossed it over the wall. He said, “Looks like we go over it to get your bag!” I mumbled that I was glad I wore pants as I hoisted myself up and over that wall. The conversations we had in those portable buildings were some of the more interesting on campus that day. The simple act of jumping that wall embedded a seed in my mind that refuses to let me accept any obstacles between me and potential customers. Macmillan is like that. We are constantly looking for ways to conquer the wall to reach our customers. Sometimes we do trudge around it, but oftentimes we simply have to have the courage to hop over the top and see what is waiting on the other side.”

James Luscombe, Technology Director, Pan Macmillan, UK

“The funniest thing I think that’s ever happened was a couple of years ago when we were doing the 150th anniversary publishing for Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. As part of the overall program in the marketing we’d had a white rabbit costume made, a seven-foot-tall white rabbit. We were all sitting in one of the glass-walled meeting rooms having our weekly acquisitions meeting, and someone was testing the suit, so we were deep in thought and discussion about which books to buy. Suddenly this giant white rabbit walked past the meeting room, and everyone froze and went silent and watched.”

Keith Kahla, Executive Editor, St. Martin’s Press, US

“When I first started at St. Martin’s in 1988, then–CEO and editorial director Thomas J. McCormack told me this story about how All Creatures Great and Small came about.

In 1971, St. Martin’s Press was a small, barely profitable publisher. On a business trip to England, an agent pulled copies of the first couple James Herriot books off his shelf—literally blowing dust off them—and passed them on to Tom McCormack. In England, the books were published as paperbacks with cartoon covers and jokey titles. They were called If Only They Could Talk and It Shouldn’t Happen to a Vet.

Tom brought them home and tossed them on his nightstand to read eventually. His wife, Sandra, however, got to them first, and after reading the first one, insisted that it was something special and that Tom simply had to publish it. He agreed, but thought the original UK approach was wrong. Instead of treating them as comical, he saw something “warm and joyful” in these books—something life affirming. So he bought the rights to the first two, then asked James Herriot to write three more chapters to bring the story to a more natural conclusion—or as he told me at the time, ‘I told Herriot to write me three more chapters and marry the girl!’ It was one of the great editorial decisions in publishing, because that was the book that became the international bestseller All Creatures Great and Small. But first they had to come up with a title that suited the new book and new approach.

Sales struggled with it, talked to all their major accounts, and came to Tom and said, “We’ve got it. All the major stores agree. We should call it Cow in the Waiting Room.” Tom tossed them out of his office. Tom wrote James Herriot, explained what he wanted for a new title, and asked him if he had any ideas. People came up with terrible title after terrible title until finally an intern who was here for the summer from the UK office of Macmillan suggested that we use a line from an Anglican hymn, specifically ‘All creatures great and small.’ At the same time, a letter arrived from James Herriot, showing that he was thinking along the same lines but missed it just a bit. His suggestion? Ill Creatures Great and Small.

And the difference between an international bestseller and enduring classic and a book that would be long forgotten is one letter.”

Ansa Khan Khattak, Editor, Picador UK

“I think my favourite moment since I’ve been at Macmillan was Picador having two books on the Man Booker Prize shortlist. I don’t think that happens very often, but we had A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara and The Year of the Runaways by Sunjeev Sahota. And it was just such a brilliant, exciting time. We’ve been working to make Picador the home of international writing again, so have been growing our list of titles in translation. And then I think what Macmillan does really well is taking care of our authors and building them, building their brands. So hopefully another 175 years of that.”

Gillian Spain, Sales and Marketing Manager, Pan Macmillan South Africa

“I’ve been with Pan Macmillan for only five short years of those 175, but in that time I’ve had so many wonderful experiences, met so many fascinating authors, and had the pleasure of being part of a really special team. Some of the highlights have included meeting President Thabo Mbeki and going for tea at the Nelson Mandela Foundation and getting to meet the iconic Winnie Madikizela-Mandela when we published her book 491 Days. It’s an honour to be part of a company that contributes so richly to the literary landscape both at home and in many other countries around the world. I feel very blessed to be part of the Macmillan family and look forward to making many more special memories.”

Tazmin Morgan, Sales and Marketing Coordinator, Pan Macmillan South Africa

“My journey with Pan Macmillan started in October 2016 as an intern. I applied for the internship during the last weeks of my publishing honours degree on a whim, mixed with nerves and determination, hoping that this would be the perfect leap from the theory of publishing straight into real-life practice. On my very first day I was waiting for a lift to take me up to the offices, which were located on the second floor, and I happened to bump into Terry Morris, the current managing director of Pan South Africa. While waiting for the lift we introduced ourselves, and I mistakenly called her Trudy in my nervous haze. What a way to make a good impression on the first day! Luckily for me, that didn’t soil my first impression with Terry!

My yearlong internship ended in October 2017. I then applied and got the position of sales and marketing coordinator. I must say that I am incredibly lucky to be working with a team of nurturing, passionate individuals who have helped along the way. The Pan teams from South Africa, the UK, and the US have been warm and friendly throughout my journey, and I feel as though I have been here much longer than I actually have! I am still green to the industry, but the dreamy feeling when I walk through those doors or see our books on the bookstore shelf has not left me.”

Tom Cookson, Head of Strategic Finance, Pan Macmillan

“When our authors and illustrators visit us, the whole company, two-hundred-plus people, greet them in reception, and it’s always an amazing moment when they arrive actually and see how enthusiastic and how involved everyone in the company is in what they create.”

Michael Flamini, Executive Editor, St. Martin’s Press, US

“I started work at Macmillan as the editorial director of the scholarly and reference division in November 1994. One of the first events I attended was the sales conference which, that year, was being held in New Jersey. I boarded the bus and took a window seat, and there was an empty seat next to me. A blond-haired woman got on and said, ‘Baby, is this seat taken?’ And I said, ‘Well, no…’ ‘Good,’ she said, and she extended her hand. ‘I’m Sally Richardson.’ And I thought, ‘Oh my god, she’s the boss and I’m no one.…’ She couldn’t have made me feel more welcome, but there was more to come. I rode back to the city with the head of my division, Garrett Kiely, Sally, and the late, much-missed Mark Goldfarb in his car. When we got through the Holland Tunnel, we found ourselves in the middle of the usual rush-hour traffic jam. Sally said, ‘I’ll fix this.’ She jumped out of the car and began directing traffic. No, really—true story. Next to us, there was a van full of really big guys who were glaring at me, Garrett, and Mark. I swore that we were toast, but—true to form—Sally untangled the mess, the van took off, and Sally jumped back in the car and said ‘Go, Mark!’ And off we went.”

Caroline Hogg, Editorial Director, Adult Fiction, Pan Macmillan

“If you’re going to read one or two books and you’ve been waiting all year to relax on your holiday, I love seeing people pick up Macmillan books. And sometimes I want to grab them and say, ‘Thank you so much.’ What I really hope we will remember is that the reason we’ve got to where we are is that we have this incredible creativity and compassion and a great sense of humour. And I hope we always manage to keep that at the heart of everything we do.”

Bob Miller, President and Publisher, Flatiron Books, US

“After graduating from college in 1978, I spent two humid summer months failing typing tests at every publishing company in New York; I even managed to fail the Doubleday test three consecutive times. I had typed my term papers in college, but never at high speed, so I was very relieved when Tom Dunne offered me a job as the lower-ranked of his two assistants at St. Martin’s Press … at which there was no typing test at the time.

I practiced my typing at home every night (JJJ/FFF, etc.…) but I was still slow and made lots of mistakes, which meant that I had an unusually high need for Wite-Out, that magical liquid with which one could paint over mistakes before retyping the correct letter or word. So I would often find myself heading to the office of Helen Plog, the St. Martin’s Press office manager, who ruled her supply closet with an iron fist.

Helen became more annoyed with me each time I showed up at her door. Finally, one day she accused me of reselling the Wite-Out she had been giving me to other companies (or maybe she imagined that I was dealing it like loose joints in Madison Square Park). I was so concerned that this accusation would jeopardize my job status that I began buying my own supply.

(I feel lucky to be back in the Flatiron Building after all these years … with Microsoft Word saving me from further humiliation involving liquid paper.)”

Annika Bergstrand-Henry, Senior Facilities Manager, Pan Macmillan

“Macmillan is more than the sum of its parts … I think that the creativity and passion and the people all together, it’s a family, so all together creates the spirit of Macmillan.”

Kat Brzozowski, Editor, Swoon Reads/Feiwel & Friends, US

“My most memorable Macmillan experience was when I had to find a way to get a famous cat from the UK to the US for book publicity. The author didn’t want to put the cat with luggage on the plane for safety reasons, so I had to call various cruise lines to see if they allowed cats on cross-Atlantic voyages. I also had to research cat vaccinations, quarantines, et cetera. Every time I made calls, I said, ‘This is Kat, calling about the cat.’ In the end, the cat didn’t come over, but our book still hit the bestseller list.”

Charlotte Williams, Senior Brand Manager, Pan Macmillan

“Something that’s been really influential for me personally has been working with Ann Cleeves, who’s such a passionate advocate for libraries. And it’s proved infectious for me. So I’m now a real library fan and truly understand why we should all be getting behind them, so that’s been really influential for me.”

Sophie Brewer, Associate Publisher, Editorial Management, Adult Books

“The joy of being small with the power of being big. I think being in that sweet spot in the industry is quite a special place to be, as we can continue to be fleet of foot and small as well as important and opinionated and big.”

Megan Barnard, Senior Creative Manager, Tor Books, US

“In 2004, I started at Macmillan in a junior position. I think it was in 2005 when we had the renovations and we had to shuffle around floors. Well, my manager, my department assistant, and I ended up sharing a point office—it was an upper floor—but I can’t remember which one. It was glorious. We reveled in our new status and invited our peers to gaze out our windows. Since then I have been in point offices, but alas, not like in those brief months.”

Raquel A. Millman, Assistant General Counsel, Macmillan Publishers, US

“Working for Macmillan is often rewarding and exciting. It’s great to feel like you are on the right side of the First Amendment. I love when I read a book and then read the acknowledgments from the author and see the names of people who I work with. My favorite story from when my personal life collided with my professional life was when my five-year-old son developed a love for Little Elliot. I was excited to tell Jonathan Yaged about it. And Jonathan was so touched. He gave me a plush Little Elliot for my son. My son has been sleeping with that plush doll every night ever since. This is a wonderful place to work and a fabulous company!”

Gretchen Fredericksen, Sales Strategy Coordinator, Macmillan Publishers, US

“Although I have only been with the company for one year I have already had the opportunity to have some incredible experiences. Seeing James Comey speak about his book, A Higher Loyalty, at Barnes & Noble in Union Square was one of these standout events that, as an assistant, I never would have considered to be a possibility. I am grateful for the inviting and open atmosphere at Macmillan that allowed me to join the small group attending the event and experience the privilege of waltzing into the store with no tickets and cutting to the front with the simple claim that ‘We’re the publisher.’”

Theresa DeLucci, Associate Director of Marketing, Tor/Forge, US
Pritpaul Bains, Marketing Tech and Operations Manager,
Central Marketing, Macmillan Publishers, US

“Not many people want to get married in their office building, but when it’s the historic Flatiron Building—and we only had five weeks to plan the big day—we got creative (and maybe slightly panicked).

Macmillan has played a big role in our story from the very start. We wouldn’t have met if we didn’t both attend the prestigious (to nerds) 2008 Clarion West Writers Workshop for speculative fiction writers in Seattle. Post-workshop, we were long-distance for many years until Pritpaul was fortunate enough to be in the right place at the right time with his résumé and began his own career at Macmillan.

When unforeseen events left us scrambling for a wedding venue, we asked John Sargent for permission to get married in the Flatiron. John immediately, generously, offered his own office—with its lovely balcony and sprawling views, it has been the site of more than one marriage proposal in the past.

But we had something bigger in mind.

With the help and coordination of Office Services (no candles!), legal (no going on the roof!), friends from all over Macmillan, and the Tor Harry Potter Book Club, we redecorated the tenth-floor conference room and invited fifty of our closest friends, family, and coworkers. A Tor senior editor even got ordained as a reverend in the Universal Life Church to perform the ceremony. John let us take pictures on his balcony and, as far as we know, according to the New York City County Clerk public records, we are the only wedding to have taken place in the Flatiron Building.

We had our reception downtown—no one wants to spend all day at work on a Saturday—but what we most remember is the beautiful, unique ceremony and its real sense of community, a wedding that could have taken place only at Macmillan, where community is such an integral part of the company.”

William Soeltz, Senior Regional Sales Manager, Macmillan Learning

“I joined Macmillan in 1984 as a sales rep with the college division of St. Martin’s Press. I was one of thirteen reps with a territory of Washington, Oregon, Montana, Wyoming, and Colorado. It was all books then. We had seventeen new titles that year, which included the first Hacker Handbook, Rules for Writers. At my first meeting there were never more than twenty people in the room. We would sit on the outside edge of a horseshoe table and converse with the editor who was presenting a book. There was no marketing, nothing digital, and you could still smoke your cigarettes in the meeting room. I was always on the road visiting my eighty-plus schools. Road trips often lasted two to three weeks, spending weekends away from home. As a young man, I couldn’t believe I was paid to travel to such beautiful parts of the country and talk with smart, interesting people about ideas and education. To this day, that has not changed. The core of Macmillan has always been the wonderful people. In fact, I met my lovely wife at Macmillan.”

Clarissa Macaya, Administrative Assistant, Office Services,
Macmillan Publishers, US

“I started adding photos to the Lost and Found email blasts to increase the chances of people being reunited with their lost items. As it turns out, the photos were curious conversation starters, probably because this is a company full of creative thinkers. When Tova Rohatiner came to me with a bottle of mustard, she thought I wouldn’t send the email blast because, well, it was pretty frivolous. I have a healthy sense of humor, and since Verna didn’t object and it made Tova really happy … I sent the blast. I’m pretty sure the entire Flatiron Building had a laugh that day, based on the number of responses received. People told me whole floors erupted in simultaneous laughter. There have been lots of other photos since; whatever else may be turned in, we’ll always have the memory of this mustard.”

Alexis Saarela, Associate Director of Publicity, Tor/Forge/Tor Teen/Starscape Books, US

“When I was starting out at Macmillan/Tor, I began working on a book that was getting a new film based upon it—I Am Legend by Richard Matheson. This was a thrill, as Matheson, his short stories, novellas, and novels, and The Twilight Zone episodes and movies based on his work have always been favorites of mine (yes, even that seventies version of I Am Legend starring Shatner!). He was eightysomething at the time, and not on email at all, so I had to call him in order to interview him for a Q and A that we sent out to press. What a great conversation! I also got to set up interviews for him with some major media—and was thrilled that he was getting some much-deserved recognition that he hadn’t in the past.

The icing on the cake was that I was given the amazing chance to attend the movie premiere, with Will Smith (who starred in the new version) among the celebrities in attendance. Our movie tie-in edition of the book hit the New York Times bestseller list, which we were so happy to let Matheson know.

Over the next couple of years, I was privileged to work on publicizing more of Matheson’s work, including his first new novel in many years, some new editions of his classics, and another collection that hit the big screen. He unfortunately passed away in 2013, but his work will live on as he is a true master of the horror, suspense, and science fiction genres.”

Verna Shamblee, Director of Facilities, Macmillan Publishers, US

“Okay, so I have two stories, both about author visits to the Flatiron Building. First, I got a request from St. Martin’s Press saying that Lady Gaga planned to visit and asking could I facilitate getting her in the building. They asked that I have the traffic stopped on Fifth Avenue so her car could approach without a problem. I can work miracles, but that was a bit much. Instead, I got clearance from Flatiron Partnership to have her car pull up in the plaza opposite the freight entrance, which would give her access to the freight car (she didn’t want to take a regular passenger car). Instead, they drove up on the sidewalk from Twenty-Second Street, barely missing the folks strolling by. She exited the car wearing an outfit resembling a condom with matching hat to the surprise of the folks sitting in the plaza. I whisked her into the freight car and up to the waiting gathering on the fifteenth floor, only later to repeat the process getting her back out of the building.

Next, I got a request from St. Martin’s Press that Jackie Collins would be visiting the building and would need parking for her bus. When she visited folks in Rockefeller Center, it cost a thousand dollars for a few hours. I was able to obtain clearance from our local police department to prohibit parking on Fifth Avenue in front of our building for her bus. Once she found out there would be no cost, she wanted to meet me to find out how I did it. I told her I couldn’t share the secret, and she laughed. She invited me to tour the bus and join her for champagne in our offices.”

Peter Janssen, Vice President, Director of Academic and Library Marketing, Macmillan Publishers, US

“The most influential title that I’ve worked on in my eighteen years at Macmillan is by far Ishmael Beah’s A Long Way Gone (Sarah Crichton Books/FSG). When I think of the thousands of titles I’ve had the privilege of working on, nothing stands out quite like this book. I think there are more than two million copies in print at this point, with many, if not most, of them going into school and college classrooms.

Over the years, I’ve heard some incredibly powerful stories from teachers about the impact the book has had on their students. I saved all of them and recently went back to read them again. There was a teacher from Richmond, Virginia, who picked up an ARC at a high school English teacher conference back in 2006 and said, ‘I teach in an urban school and I need something to tie Elie Wiesel’s Night to my students’ lives, something to show that this kind of thing still happens.’ I don’t think I realized at the time just how prescient his words were, because that is just how A Long Way Gone has come to be taught.

One of the most moving stories came at another teacher convention in 2010, from a teacher who told me that her kids’ school (a wealthy, white school in Jacksonville, Florida) had a full day of activities where they acted out the book—no food all day, being forced to hide, and so on. I remember her tearing up as she told me, ‘It changed my youngest. It changed him! It finally made him understand how privileged he is, that his life is a fairy tale in comparison.’ If ever there was a book that has reminded me over and over why it is we do what we do, of the impact our work can have, it was this book. I feel lucky to have been a part of it.”

Christy Ottaviano, Publisher, Christy Ottaviano Books/Henry Holt

“When I was an associate editor I was thrilled to finally get my own office. It was located right by the back elevator on 115 West Eighteenth Street. Prior to Marc Aronson’s time in it, according to Holt lore, this office space was known as the Smoker’s Closet. Keeping true to its name, the office was tiny and smelled like cigarettes for the entire time it was my work home. It had this wonderful Rapunzel-esque window that faced out onto Nineteenth Street. What I especially loved about this office was its location—it was on the same hallway as the illustrious Holt adult editorial team. On the other side of the elevator next to me was Jack Macrae, and then down the line it went: Marian Wood, Bill Strachan, Ray Roberts, Allen Peacock, Sara Bershtel, and Ken Wright, among other notables. The hallway had a lovely sound to it. There was Albert Lafarge, Jack Macrae’s assistant editor, whose office was across from Jack’s. Albert would walk in and out of Jack’s office with a phone in one hand and a long extension phone cord in the other as he peppered Jack with questions. There were the days that Marian Wood would become incensed about something and you could hear her furiously yelling one minute and then laughing heartily the next. I loved when Ray Roberts would come for a visit at my far end of the hallway and update me on how Thomas Pynchon’s novel (Mason & Dixon) was coming along. He never revealed all that much, but it was pretty exciting to have this esteemed editor swing by for a chat. For a while there was a coffee pot located across from my office, and Sarah Bershtel and Marc Aronson would gather there in the morning and discuss what they were reading. And then there was Buffalo—the little dog that Jack Macrae would occasionally house-sit, who would walk down the hall like he owned the joint and settle on my floor for a few hours before moving on to his other favored offices. I was only in that cigarette closet office for three years, but it was a really wonderful window into a period in Holt’s history, and I feel fortunate to have had such a nice view.”

John Sargent, CEO, Macmillan

“I have lots of Macmillan memories. Jeff Bezos in his hotel room in D.C. explaining his ideas for an internet bookstore. Justice Kimba Wood giving the Feds the cold stare in her chambers during the Apple case. A bizarre hour with Michael Jackson in a chain hotel in Stamford. The Dieter von Holtzbrinck retirement puppet show in an East German plane bunker or the Chuck Christensen retirement skit with the Vikings and angels.

The best memories are when we have fun together. And that happens most often at sales conference: Sales conference with LL Cool J. Late 1990s. Short Hills, New Jersey.

We had asked him if he would perform, and he had declined, saying he would need to bring all his equipment. Dinner was in a tent, and we had a room set up for dancing on the way back into the hotel. There was a DJ, and they had set up a small wooden podium with a mic in case I wanted to make a speech. The trade sales force back then, as now, were reluctant on the dance floor. I had asked that the DJ bring lots of LL Cool J songs. After dinner I hustled over and told the DJ to watch me, and when I waved my arm, to put on ‘Mama Said Knock You Out’ as fast as possible. Then Barbara Andrews (the sales director at the time) and I proceeded to dance. All alone. With the lights on and everyone watching.

Three songs in, LL comes walking by, pant leg rolled up, headed back to his room. I wave my arm like mad. The DJ is on his game. Just as LL passes the door, his song starts. He pauses … and then saunters toward the dance floor. At this point all dancing reluctance seems to vanish and there is a lively competition to ask him to dance. A few songs later the place is hopping, and he looks at the DJ and says, ‘Hell no, put it back to the beginning.’ Then he jumps behind the podium, leans forward into the little mic, and proceeds to let loose, just belting it out. When there is a pause in the song lyrics, LL starts to holler, ‘I want to see you juuuummmmp!’ Here’s the snapshot in my head: A bland conference room. Slightly behind my left shoulder LL Cool J at the mic, face shining with sweat. In the left-hand corner a small knot of people talking to Oliver Stone. And there in the middle, gloriously, are the gathered Macmillan masses. Though many seem to lack the grace for the task at hand, we are, one and all, airborne.

Of course, there was also that time when I was planning with John Murphy to rappel down the Flatiron with a reporter/photographer present to protest to the landlord about the elevators.…”

Christopher Gonzalez, Digital Production Manager,
Macmillan Publishers, US

“In the fall of 2015, I got to work on the ebook for Sloane Crosley’s debut novel, The Clasp. I was hooked: I read nearly fifty pages at my desk that day, and I was excited to learn she would be at BookCourt (#RIP) for a reading and signing. The first of many Macmillan authors I would have the pleasure of meeting, Sloane was incredibly kind when I told her that I’d worked on the book—she signed my copy and left a note, something to the effect of ‘Thank you for helping make this an ebook.’ Working in ebook production can sometimes feel like working in the shadows of a publishing house, but I do think about this moment and so many other little moments with authors, to remind myself that what we do actually matters and is just as much a part of the publishing process as any other.”

Joseph W. Rinaldi, Associate Director of Publicity, St. Martin’s Press, US

“In nearly three decades at SMP/Macmillan, I’ve been blessed to have the best seat in the house. It’s been exhilarating watching a company with two hundred employees across five floors grow to more than a thousand employees and take over the whole Flatiron Building. I’ve had the privilege of managing roughly two hundred bestsellers throughout the years and working with everyone from emerging authors to major names such as Pat Buchanan and David Ortiz. However, before I got to this point, I had to start somewhere. Somewhere was a temp receptionist, and in my second week, working in a new and still-bare-bones publicity department that was just coming together, a most incredible event occurred. My whole world changed the morning I answered a call from the late investigative journalist of 60 Minutes, Mike Wallace. Mr. Wallace was calling … dripping wet, in his shower.

His call concerned a book that was about to put SMP on the map—By Way of Deception. We had a publicity department of roughly five full-time people then, and despite me being the guy brought in simply to answer the phone, this exploding, news-making bestseller became an ‘all hands on deck’ moment. I rolled up my sleeves, dove in with the rest of the team, and had the time of my life being part of the kind of moment everyone who handles publicity should get to experience—joyous chaos, and a million-copy number one bestseller!

I knew from that moment this was the place for me.”

Brad Wood, Director of Sales, Amazon, Macmillan Publishers, US

“In his annual company addresses, John Sargent often refers to the fun factor as a criteria for a successful year. When I think back on my experiences at Macmillan, those shining moments of pure fun stand out the most: meeting brilliant, charming authors like Louise Penny, Hilary Mantel, Michael Eric Dyson, James Comey, and Robin Sloane (and even a few celebrities—Bruce Campbell and Hulk Hogan, I’m thinking of you!); elaborate (and delicious) bestseller cakes painted with cover art—the one with Monica Lewinsky’s face comes to mind; sales conference adventures that include throwing axes and riding horses at a ranch in Arizona, exploring the streets of the French Quarter, hanging out on the beach in Florida, sleeping in a haunted hotel room at the Coronado in San Diego; watching books take form—from launch and cover development to in-house buzz and excitement at sales calls, and finally holding the finished product in my hands; and of course, seeing bestsellers form before my very eyes—most recently, watching sales for Fire and Fury and A Higher Loyalty skyrocket after presidential tweets. There’s a lot of hard work involved, of course—but it’s well rewarded with memories like these.”

Anne Hellman, Sales Representative, Macmillan Publishers, US

“In his early days at SMP, Matthew Shear liked to add some entertainment into the mass market presentations at sales conference, with skits, costumes, and contests. The year we published our first Janet Evanovich title he held a Survivor-type contest among the reps, where we had to write a song or poem about her new book and the rest of the group voted us out one by one. I don’t remember the exact rules of the contest, but I know I ended up performing a song and dance in front of everyone. I was completely embarrassed, but at least I won. Lucky for me this was before camera phones so there is no record of it.”

Jeff Skillman, Technical Product Specialist, Macmillan Learning

“The University of Kansas biology department had used Pearson’s Campbell classic biology textbook for nearly twenty years, but new professors were getting involved, and we made a case for our How Life Works and its accompanying LaunchPad. After many, many information-gathering meetings with various committee members, we built a very strong case for the text. Our team worked this adoption for what felt like an eternity. Then one day, a key committee member asked to meet over beer and wings near campus with some of the other committee members. I came prepared with a final service agreement and pricing proposal, and we officially closed the business that day, but the work had just begun. Since our partnership began, the freshman biology course for majors has seen a decrease in their drop/fail/withdraw rates and an increase in the overall rigor of the course. In other words, we’ve helped impact student learning in a positive way—that’s why I love what I do at Macmillan Learning!”

Claire Eddy, Senior Editor, Tor Books

“I’ve had the great good fortune to be with this organization for more than three decades, and I’ve edited my fair share of books. I love them all … but I think that I will be best known for editing Kushiel’s Dart by Jacqueline Carey.

One of the most gratifying moments in my career came late one summer night when making my way home on the subway. There were two older women traveling together, and one of the women was loudly telling her companion about the book she’d just finished. She was empowered and wanted every woman she knew to read this book—it truly had transformed her life. I didn’t pay that much attention … but as they began to exit at their stop, the woman pulled out a copy of Kushiel’s Dart and handed it to her friend. They left before I could find just how this woman came to find this book as she wasn’t in any demographic that I could ever possibly imagine reading it.

But something I’d worked on had made an amazing difference in someone’s life, and that’s a high like no other … and I think that’s why I think we all got into this business.”

Reed Oros, Sales Representative, Macmillan Publishers, US

“At any rate, not long after I was hired, in 1984 (I think this is how everything went) the ABA convention—as it was known in those days—was being hosted by San Francisco, in the newly minted Moscone Center. I was the local rep. Nervous as hell in my new job, but excited—naturally, I suppose. At any rate, St. Martin’s was hosting a cocktail reception (the location from this distance in time, to me, is fuzzy; it may have been the Sir Francis Drake or the St. Francis Hotel, I’m not sure) for renowned crooner Eddie Fisher (he of the many starlet wives and weddings—Debbie Reynolds, Elizabeth Taylor, et al.). I remember running around like crazy trying to help publicists and buyers be happy and supplied—both with alcohol and canapés. And the two things I remember the most were that Eddie Fisher was wearing a yellow suit, and the main appetizer we were providing was … lamb loin chops. Gourmet? Sure. Greasy. Yep. If any of that got on Eddie Fisher, I felt my days as a rep would be numbered. I was scooping up cocktail napkins wherever I could find them, and not-so-discreetly pressing them into guests’ hands. The event turned out pretty well, with Eddie actually singing ‘Oh! My Papa’ to the adoring crush of booksellers. Whew!”

Brian Wheel, Sales Representative, Macmillan Learning

“One of my favorite stories is about Tom Kling, a legendary sales representative who retired not long ago. He was in a sales call, and the professor he was talking to wouldn’t make eye contact. So Tom stood up and laid down on the floor. The professor freaked out, but Tom said in order for me to do my job, you need to look at me and connect. The professor sent Tom out. But he later got the business.”

Sarah Bonamino, Publicity Assistant, St. Martin’s Press

“My first internship was in the spring of 2016 at Macmillan Learning. On my first day, I got settled in and was generally overwhelmed with the fact that I was one step closer to starting my career in my dream job. In the afternoon, my supervisor asked if I wanted to come down for a meeting. Surprised that I would be invited to a meeting so quickly, I said sure and asked what the meeting was about. She replied that every year our CEO, John Sargent, came and spoke with the employees about our results from the previous year and goals for the upcoming one, answering questions from the employees. As I sat through the address on the first day in my first internship, I was amazed that a CEO would have such an open and frank conversation about the questions and concerns employees had. Sitting in that same address two years later, this time in midtown, I remembered how amazed I was that first day two years ago and how proud I am to work for Macmillan today.”

Kate Geraghty, VP, Communications, Macmillan Learning

“When I tell people I work in publishing, the common response is usually ‘Ooohh!’ When I reveal I am in educational publishing, it is then followed by a much deflated ‘Oh. Huh.’ As the value of education is continuously debated in our daily news cycle, I would argue our role has never been more important. Now, when people ask me what I do, I add, “Education matters. Content matters. At Macmillan, I work with an incredibly gifted, passionate group of people who are all committed to improving education. We work with the best thinkers in their fields who have changed the way students think, write, and learn. We are the company that worked with Linus Pauling, Paul Krugman, David Myers, Diana Hacker, Rob Lue, Andrea Lunsford, Jennifer Doudna, and so many more. And while those authors were defining quantum chemistry, winning Nobel Prizes, traveling the world to teach students writing, leading the CRISPR revolution, and working to cure cancer, they were also working with Macmillan to improve learning.”

Alison Lazarus, President, Sales Division, Macmillan Publishers, US

“It was some years ago at a sales conference, I believe we were in Arizona. As was tradition at our away conferences, we’d had a free afternoon where attendees could participate in a number of planned activities. Our CEO, John Sargent, had gone out with the golfing group. That night at dinner he came over to me looking a bit embarrassed. ‘I’ve done something I probably shouldn’t have,’ he said. It seemed our sales rep, Gary Cate, who was John’s golfing partner, had challenged John to a bet on the links, and John had accepted. If Gary sunk a certain putt, John would commit us to having a sales conference in Gary’s hometown of Kansas City—a place that certainly wasn’t on our roster of venues. Fortunately, John beat Gary on the putt. But as the light was fading, on the last green, Gary challenged John—again! As John relayed it, he couldn’t say no to one of our reps, so the bet was on. This time, Gary won the hole and the bet. ‘You can pick a time to go whenever you want,’ conceded John, ‘but we have to go to Kansas City.’ And we did go—a couple of years later. After that, I made John promise, no more betting on the golf course!”

Talia Sherer, Senior Director, Library Marketing and National Accounts Manager, Macmillan Publishers, US

“I may have mentioned to then–Macmillan author Chelsea Cain that her mysteries needed to stay gory to keep me entertained (I cannot believe that I said this … but I was still a very young publishing pup), and she responded with the following: ‘I’d like to apologize to Talia Sherer, Macmillan’s library marketing manager. I know this book isn’t gory enough for you, Talia. I promise to make up for it next time.’ —Chelsea Cain, in The Night Season (see acknowledgments).”

Sofiya Androshchuk, HRIS Associate, Macmillan Publishers, US

“I have not always liked to read, but spending time with a friend who volunteered at a library certainly made me fall in love with being surrounded by books. Over the years my interest in reading changed like a tide; sometimes I had to work harder at finding the time and the right book. In the three years I have worked here, my love for books has come back full force. To be surrounded by people who love what they do and love books has inspired me to read more than I ever had. I love telling people I work in publishing, even if it’s just in HR, that I work so close to the people who make the stories we love a reality, and that I get to immerse myself in books in the office and at home.”

Notes

CHAPTER 1

  1. Charles L. Graves, Life and Letters of Alexander Macmillan (London: Macmillan, 1910), 5.

  2. Thomas Hughes, Memoir of Daniel Macmillan (London: Macmillan, 1882), 4.

  3. Hughes, 18.

  4. Hughes, 20.

  5. Graves, 8.

  6. Hughes, 7.

  7. Hughes, 10–11.

  8. Hughes, 11.

  9. Hughes, 15.

10. Hughes, 30.

11. Hughes, 32.

12. Graves, 11.

13. Graves, 12.

14. Graves, 15.

15. Hughes, 50.

16. Hughes, 55.

17. Hughes, 63.

18. Hughes, 66.

19. Hughes, 67.

20. Graves, 19.

21. Hughes, 78.

22. Joseph Brandt, The House of Macmillan (1843–1943) by Charles Morgan, The Journal of Modern History, University of Chicago Press, vol 16, no. 3, September 1944, p. 233.

23. Hughes, 133.

24. Hughes, 146.

25. Hughes, 152.

26. Graves, 26.

27. Hughes, 155.

28. Hughes, 211.

29. Graves, 57.

30. Hughes, 302.

31. Graves, 205.

32. Elizabeth James, “Letters from America,” Macmillan: A Publishing Tradition, 1843–1970, ed. Elizabeth James (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 171.

CHAPTER 3

33. Rimi B. Chatterjee, “Macmillan in India,” Macmillan: A Publishing Tradition, ed. by Elizabeth James. (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 153–169.

34. Macmillan News, Spring 1973, vol. 2, no. 1.

CHAPTER 6

35. James, 171.

36. James, 171.

37. James, 172.

38. James, 175.

39. The New Georgia Encyclopedia online reference.

40. The New Georgia Encyclopedia online reference.

41. James, 182.

42. Michener introduction in Gone with the Wind, anniversary edition (New York: Macmillan, 1975), vii.

43. Michener, p. viii.

44. James, p. 182.

45. Todd S. Purdum, Something Wonderful: Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Broadway Revolution (New York: Henry Holt, 2018), 170.

Written and Created By

ELIZABETH CATALANO, St. Martin’s Press, US

TRACEY CHEETHAM, Pan Macmillan Australia

ERIN D. COFFEY, Macmillan Publishers, US

TODD ELDER, Macmillan Learning, US

TWISNE FAN, Macmillan Publishers, US

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STEVEN STATHAKIS, Macmillan Publishers, US

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eISBN 9781250239112

First eBook edition: November 2018