Continuum International Publishing Group

• 1. Introduction

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  Continuum International Publishing Group was a publisher of academic books, with editorial offices in London and in New York City. Its shelves held philosophy, film studies, theology and a long run of small books about single music albums. How did a company with transatlantic offices come together in the first place? What kind of books did it choose to make, and which older publishing houses did it absorb along the way? And how did a publisher with its own name end up printing its new books under someone else's?

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• 2. The 1999 Merger

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  Continuum International came into existence in 1999, and it was assembled from parts. One part was the academic and religious lists of Cassell, the London publisher. Those lists carried several imprints with them, including Geoffrey Chapman, Mansell, Mowbray, Pinter and Leicester University Press. The other part was the Continuum Publishing Company, which had been founded in New York in 1980. Joining a British group of lists to an American house explains the two-city arrangement of its offices. What the combined firm decided to publish became its real identity.

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• 3. Humanities In Print

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  The academic programme at Continuum leaned heavily toward the humanities. Philosophy, film and music, literature, education, linguistics, theology and biblical studies were the fields that defined its catalogue. Two titles stand out from that catalogue. Continuum published Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire, a landmark work in the study of education. It also published 33 1/3, a series of music criticism. The publisher therefore spanned a classroom classic and a series of compact books for music fans. Both kinds of book needed backlists and imprints, and Continuum went shopping for more.

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• 4. Buying Other Houses

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  Athlone Press had been founded in 1948 as the publishing house of the University of London. In 1979 it was sold to the Bemrose Corporation, and Continuum later acquired it. A different kind of purchase came in 2003, when Continuum bought the London firm Hambledon & London. That firm had been named Sunday Times Small Publisher of the Year for 2001-02. It published trade history aimed at the general reader rather than the specialist. The mix of acquisitions left Continuum with a family of imprints, among them Burns & Oates, T&T Clark, Thoemmes Press and a history imprint called Hambledon Continuum. Ownership of the whole group would soon change hands.

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• 5. Passing To Bloomsbury

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  Nova Capital Management bought Continuum in 2005. The investment firm held the publisher for six years. In July 2011, Bloomsbury Publishing took Continuum over. The change reached the spines of the books in September 2012. From that month, every new Continuum title appeared under the Bloomsbury name, through an imprint called Bloomsbury Academic. The older books by Freire and the music series that Continuum had built were now part of a larger publisher's list.

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