Greenwood Publishing Group

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Greenwood Publishing Group began life not as a publisher of new ideas, but as a rescuer of forgotten ones. In 1967, two men named Harold Mason and Harold Schwartz set up shop in Greenwood, New York, with a singular mission: bring back books that had gone out of print. Mason was a librarian and antiquarian bookseller. Schwartz came from trade publishing. Between them, they had exactly the instincts needed to build a catalog from scavenged material. What they could not have predicted was that the company they founded would, over the following six decades, pass through the hands of a paper manufacturer, a Dutch publishing giant, a major American media corporation, and ultimately land inside a British publishing house with a centuries-long pedigree. Along the way, Greenwood would publish more than ten thousand titles, absorb a roster of rival imprints, and eventually stop using its own name on new books entirely. How does a small reprint house become one of the more consequential academic publishers in North American history? The answer runs through a long-serving president, a string of corporate mergers, and a Connecticut office on Post Road West that closed without ceremony in 2008.

• 2. Two Harolds and a Catalog

  ›

  Harold Mason's background in antiquarian bookselling gave Greenwood Press its first editorial compass: the American Library Association's first edition of Books for College Libraries, published in 1967. That list became a shopping guide. If a title appeared there and was no longer in print, Greenwood would bring it back. The company ran two reprint tracks from the start. Under the Greenwood Press imprint it reproduced out-of-print books. Under a separate label called Greenwood Reprint it published out-of-print periodicals, grouped under the series name American Radical Periodicals. The dual structure was deliberate. Reference works and radical journalism occupied different library budgets, and Greenwood wanted access to both. In 1969, just two years after the company's founding, both Harolds sold the business to Williamhouse-Regency, a paper and stationery manufacturing company that was at the time listed on the American Stock Exchange. The new owner had the capital to push the reprint operation further, and it did, adding a microform publishing imprint called Greenwood Microforms. By 1970, however, the company had quietly begun a small scholarly monograph project, a signal that its ambitions were already moving past reproduction and toward creation.

• 3. The Hagelstein Era

  ›

  Robert Hagelstein arrived in 1970, hired from the Johnson Reprint Corporation division of Academic Press as vice-president. His timing was exact. Mason and Schwartz left the company in 1973, and Hagelstein stepped into the presidency, a role he would hold for the next twenty-seven years until his retirement at the end of 1999. Under his leadership, Greenwood systematically wound down its reprint activities and rebuilt itself around new scholarly, reference, and professional books. That shift was not incremental. It was a large-scale redirection that produced more than ten thousand titles during those twenty-seven years. On the 25th of August 1976, the Congressional Information Service purchased the company. Then in 1979, Elsevier, the Dutch publishing giant, acquired CIS and with it Greenwood. That same year, Greenwood launched a new imprint, Quorum Books, aimed at professional titles in business and law. The acquisitions kept coming. On the 1st of January 1986, Greenwood purchased Praeger Publishers from CBS, Inc. Praeger had been founded in 1950 as Frederick A. Praeger, Inc., and brought with it a reputation in scholarly and general-interest books. Three years later, in 1989, Greenwood added Bergin and Garvey and Auburn House to its holdings. By the start of 1990, the company's name formally changed from Greenwood Press, Inc., to Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc.

• 4. Reed, Harcourt, and the Corporate Current

  ›

  When Elsevier merged with Reed International in 1993, Greenwood Publishing Group became part of Reed Elsevier. By the mid-1990s, the operational side of GPG was folded together with Heinemann USA, another Reed holding. The company was drifting on a current it could not control, carried from one corporate parent to the next by the logic of media consolidation rather than editorial strategy. When Hagelstein retired at the close of 1999, Wayne Smith took over as president. Smith moved quickly, adding Ablex Publishing, Oryx Press, and Libraries Unlimited to the GPG roster, and pushed into online and CD-ROM products through a new label called Greenwood Electronic Media. On the 12th of July 2001, Reed Elsevier completed its acquisition of Harcourt, and GPG shifted again, this time into Harcourt Education. Then on the 13th of December 2007, Houghton Mifflin Company acquired Harcourt, pulling GPG into yet another new corporate structure as part of the combined Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Each handoff left the editorial staff navigating fresh ownership priorities while maintaining an active publishing list across reference, scholarly, and professional categories.

• 5. The ABC-Clio Transfer

  ›

  On the 1st of October 2008, ABC-Clio and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt announced an agreement that would end Greenwood's run as a stand-alone publishing operation. ABC-Clio received a perpetual license to use the Greenwood imprints and publish its titles, including Greenwood Publishing, Praeger Publishers, Praeger Security International, and Libraries Unlimited. HMH also transferred specific assets, including copyrights, contracts, and inventory, directly to ABC-Clio. The agreement took effect immediately. The Greenwood offices at 88 Post Road West in Westport, Connecticut, closed as a result. Layoffs began in December 2008, and the formal transfer of GPG to ABC-Clio completed during 2009. Praeger Security International had been founded by Heather Ruland Staines and Adam T. Heath and had focused on international security studies; it became a stand-alone imprint of ABC-Clio alongside Libraries Unlimited, which had served librarians and teachers. The Westport address, which had anchored Greenwood's identity for decades, simply disappeared from the publishing map. What remained was not a company but a collection of imprints, each licensed to carry on under new management.

• 6. Bloomsbury and the End of a Name

  ›

  In December 2021, British publishing house Bloomsbury Publishing bought ABC-Clio and, with it, everything that remained of Greenwood. The Greenwood imprints became part of Bloomsbury's suite of labels alongside the broader ABC-Clio portfolio. The transaction was the final movement in a story that had run from a small New York reprint house to a corner of one of Britain's most prominent publishers. Two years later, in 2023, the Greenwood name stopped being used for new books. Among its notable reference titles were The Greenwood Encyclopedia of African American Folklore and The Greenwood Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and Fantasy, works that captured the breadth the company had achieved in its reference line. Libraries Unlimited, which had published professional works for librarians and teachers, survived as its own imprint within ABC-Clio and then Bloomsbury. The Greenwood name, carried from a founding in 1967 through more than half a century of ownership changes, closed its run quietly, absorbed into a corporate structure Harold Mason and Harold Schwartz could not have imagined when they pulled their first out-of-print titles from the ALA's college library list.