Short answers, pulled from the story.
The company's origins date to 1832, when William Ticknor and John Allen purchased a bookselling business in Boston and began publishing. The firm took the Houghton Mifflin name after a series of mergers and incorporated under that name in 1908. It became Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in 2007 following the acquisition of Harcourt's education and trade divisions from Reed Elsevier.
The source does not record the specific reasons Houghton Mifflin rejected the Julia Child manuscript. The company passed on the book, which Alfred A. Knopf then published in 1961. By 1966, the book had sold close to 300,000 copies, and the rejection was later dramatized in the 2009 film Julie and Julia.
Veritas Capital, a New York-based private equity firm, acquired Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in 2022. The tender offer was priced at $21 per share, valuing the company at roughly $2.8 billion. After 57% of shares were tendered on the 6th of April 2022, HMH was taken private and delisted from Nasdaq.
HarperCollins, a division of News Corp, purchased HMH Books and Media for $349 million. The deal was reported on the 29th of March 2021 and closed on the 10th of May that year. It included the trade publishing division and video game franchises including Carmen Sandiego and The Oregon Trail.
The restructuring, completed on the 10th of March 2010, reduced HMH's debt by approximately 60% and cut annual interest payments by over 75%. New equity of $650 million came from institutional investors including Paulson and Co. and Guggenheim Partners. The former Irish equity holders lost their entire investment and were left with warrants covering only 5% of the company.
HMH's catalog has included The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood, the Curious George series, The Little Prince, J.R.R. Tolkien's works for United States distribution, the Peterson Field Guides, CliffsNotes, and Webster's New World Dictionary. The company also held the Carmen Sandiego and The Oregon Trail franchises before selling them to HarperCollins in 2021.