Short answers, pulled from the story.
Random House was founded in 1927 by Bennett Cerf and Donald Klopfer. They had acquired the Modern Library imprint from publisher Horace Liveright two years earlier, and Random House began as a side venture off that base.
The name came from a remark by co-founder Bennett Cerf, who said the company was going to publish a few books on the side at random. That casual phrase directly suggested the name Random House.
In 1934, Random House published the first authorized edition of James Joyce's Ulysses in the Anglophone world. The event transformed the company into a formidable publisher over the two decades that followed.
The merger was completed on the 1st of July 2013. At formation, Bertelsmann owned 53% of the joint venture and Pearson owned 47%; Bertelsmann became the sole owner in April 2020.
At the time of the merger, the combined companies controlled 25% of the book business, employed more than 10,000 people, operated about 250 independent publishing imprints, and generated roughly 3.9 billion dollars in annual revenues.
The main United States office is in Penguin Random House Tower at 1745 Broadway in Manhattan, a 684-foot building constructed in 2009. The Random House archive and library is located in Rushden in Northamptonshire, England.