Macmillan Publishers Ltd, also known as The Macmillan Group, is a privately-held international publishing company owned by Georg von Holtzbrinck Publishing Group. It has offices in 41 countries worldwide and operates in more than thirty others.

The company is made up of over 50 different divisions operating in five areas of publishing:

• Education publishing including English language teaching (as Macmillan Education)
• Academic publishing including reference (as Palgrave Macmillan)
• Science, technological and medical publishing (as Nature Publishing Group), including Nature and other journals
• Fiction and non-fiction book publishing (as Pan Macmillan), under the imprints Pan Books, Picador, Macmillan New Writing, Papermac, Macmillan, Sidgwick & Jackson, Campbell Books, Boxtree, Channel Four Books and Macmillan Children’s Books
• Publishing Services through MPS Technologies ^* offering Content Delivery, Web Analytics, Fulfilment Services and Technology related services as well as distribution and production

History

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Macmillan was founded in 1843 by Daniel and Alexander Macmillan, two brothers from the Isle of Arran, Scotland. The company started off publishing Charles Kingsley (1855), Thomas Hughes (1859), Francis Turner Palgrave (1861), Christina Rossetti (1862), Matthew Arnold (1865) and Lewis Carroll (1865). Alfred Tennyson joined the list in 1884, Thomas Hardy in 1886 and Rudyard Kipling in 1890.

After retiring from politics in 1964, former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom Harold Macmillan became chairman of the company. After his death, his grandson Alexander Macmillan, 2nd Earl of Stockton took up the leadership of the publishers.

The company was one of the oldest independent publishing houses until 1995 when a 70% share of the company was bought by German media giant Georg von Holtzbrinck Publishing Group (Verlagsgruppe Georg von Holtzbrinc GmbH). Holtzbrinck purchased the remaining shares in 1999, ending the Macmillan family's ownership of the company.

Macmillan sold its U.S. operations to American owners in 1950, resulting in the creation of an American company Macmillan Publishing. Through its merger with Crowell Collier and other acquisitions, the U.S. publisher became a media giant in its own right, as Macmillan, Inc. It was acquired by the controversial British tycoon Robert Maxwell in 1989 and eventually dismembered in the wake of Maxwell's death (1991) and the subsequent bankruptcy proceedings. The textbook operations went to Prentice Hall and later Pearson. The name survived in America only for the encyclopedia division Macmillan Reference USA, an imprint of Thomson Gale.

External links

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• Official website
• The Macmillan Group from the Holtzbrinck Publishing Group website

Book publishing companies of the United Kingdom | Media companies of Germany