Rick Simonson

Game of the Name

One day last week, for the first time in maybe fifteen years, I sat down to do a Macmillan order. It was discombobulating, to say the least. Was it my doing? Fifteen years or so of not-returned calls or unanswered email (wait, who had email 15 years ago?). Had we been on hold? What would this be like - 30, 45 seasons to rehash? What's more, even in sitting down to this appointment to buy Macmillan I had no recollection of ever scheduling a Macmillan appointment, at least not in this millennium. The rep who came in that day was not Jon Rantala, who had last sold us Macmillan (in its phase of also including Scribner and Atheneum) ... and it most certainly wasn't Dick Mayville the rep who hailed from San Bruno, CA, and was one of those who bore with me back in the day when I was just beginning to feel my way around at doing any of this. No, the rep coming in, was Reed Oros, our Holtzbrinck rep. My recollection is that it was going to be a Holtzbrinck appointment. Farrar, Holt, Picador, Bloomsbury, no?

Those newer or younger at this than I (a working majority, one suspects) will probably find this a fairly seamless change, something of the 'whatever' sort, akin to Warner Publishing having to become Grand Central or last year's PGW-Transition Vendor-PGW shuffle. Just keeping things in present tense by whatever name - Rizzoli isn't part of this anymore, Watson-Guptill is, and our computer system doesn't always want to let go of Farrar, Straus & Giroux - is challenging enough.

For the relative few older than me who are still at this, the announcement that Holtzbrinck's U.S. operations would be re-monikered Macmillan was a kind of tying up loose ends, though it strikes one a bit like that football team - the Cleveland Browns? - that isn't the same franchise that was there for years, but has the same name (colors, logo, nickname) as the team that was there before it moved to Baltimore, even if the players and the history aren't really there anymore. There is a venerable publishing house in the U.K. that's been known as Macmillan since back before yonder. And back approximately before then, it sold its U.S. branch off in 19 and 50 (as I've heard a certain radio d.j. put the years).

The Macmillan I came of age on had, if memory serves, such titles as front- or backlist as Gone with the Mind, Jonathan Livingston Seagull, a big, slip-cased one-volume Baseball Encyclopedia, and bright, solid-colored paperbacks (Collier) of the poetry and work of W.B. Yeats, Edward Arlington Robinson, and James Dickey ... to name what comes to a scattered Monday mind. Some of those books date back to the British days, others came along after 1950. By whatever time it was in the 1980s where Scribner came into the picture, with Macmillan calling the shots, I remember an attempt to cast the Scribner backlist of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Wolfe, and Wharton - names synonomous with a publishing  house (Scribner) and/or editor (Maxwell Perkins), perhaps more than any in American letters - as Collier paperbacks.

There were - one can read back - various ownership struggles and questions, all brought into the problematic front when financial wheeler dealer Robert Maxwell assumed ownership - he of the dubious death at sea. I last remember the Macmillan name at an old ABA, one of those signs spanning the aisle, 'Maxwell Macmillan,' I believe it said. But that was that: soon Simon & Schuster, soon no more Macmillan or Atheneum as we had known them. Yeats became a Scribner author. There were shards of the old company, sold or broken off, elsewhere - McGraw-Hill I read?

Overseas, Holtzbrinck, sometime along the way, bought the U.K. Macmillan ... and, in time, has done all its purchasings/establishings here - St. Martin's, Henry Holt, Farrar, Straus, Picador. Palgrave Macmillan, long somewhat buried to us working the trade (peeks of it in a St. Martin's catalog), has this past year, perhaps ironically - or simply in good timing - been made more visible, with its own catalogs. Tying them all into one name probably makes sense, though I will miss the connection of name (I could put 'Holt' in 'Holtzbrinck') and be my own source of confusion, looking for those 0-02 prefixes even if they come with 978 at their fore. 

Posted by Rick Simonson on November 5, 2007 | Comments (2)