Transaction Publishers

• 1. Introduction

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  Transaction Publishers began its life on the 1st of July 1962, not as a book house, but as a magazine. It was a social-science periodical called Transaction: Social Science and Modern Society, launched under a multiplex grant from the Ford Foundation at Washington University in St. Louis. Few academic ventures start that modestly and grow to publish more than 6,000 titles. The story of how that happened runs through a single driving figure, a campus relocation, and a series of acquisitions that gradually assembled one of the more eclectic catalogues in American academic publishing. What did it mean to build an independent social-science press across five decades? And what became of it in the end?

• 2. Irving Louis Horowitz

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  Irving Louis Horowitz was the founder of Transaction and its chairman of the board and editorial director from the very beginning. He held those roles until his death in 2012, a span that covered virtually the entire history of the press as an independent operation. His personal archive at Penn State University, opened to public research in 2010, documents the expansion of social-science research across roughly half a century. Penn State's Historical Collections and Labor Archives houses the collection, formally titled the "Irving Louis Horowitz-Transaction Publishers Archives, 1939-2009," within the Eberly Family Special Collections Library. The existence of that archive underlines how completely Horowitz and Transaction were understood to be the same story.

• 3. From Magazine to Press

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  The Ford Foundation grant that seeded Transaction in 1962 was designed to support a multiplex project at Washington University in St. Louis, meaning Transaction was one piece of a larger academic effort. From that social-science magazine, the organization grew in three distinct directions: books, published under the imprint Transaction Books; periodicals, managed through the Transaction Periodicals Consortium; and eventually eBooks. The flagship journal, Society, was the direct descendant of the original magazine, carrying the Transaction name forward even as the book publishing operation grew around it. In 2007, Transaction sold its entire journal program, including Society, to Springer Science+Business Media, marking the moment the press fully became a book house.

• 4. Rutgers and the Faculty Network

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  In 1969, Transaction relocated to Livingston College, a newly formed institution on the Livingston campus of Rutgers University in Piscataway, New Jersey. That move shaped Transaction's character for decades. The press drew many of its editors, authors, and advisors directly from the Rutgers faculty, and close to 200 faculty members eventually served as authors or editors of Transaction books. That kind of institutional embedding gave Transaction access to academic credibility and a steady pipeline of scholarly work. Livingston College's campus remained Transaction's home through the rest of its independent existence.

• 5. The AldineTransaction Imprint

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  Aldine Publishing Co. had been a division of Walter de Gruyter, Inc., before Transaction acquired it in July 2004. Under Transaction's ownership, the books appeared under a new imprint: AldineTransaction. The imprint covered a wide disciplinary range, taking in sociology, anthropology, economics, sociobiology, physical anthropology, and public policy. Over the following years, AldineTransaction extended its reach further by acquiring book lists from Precedent Publishers in 2009 and from the Rutgers Center for Urban Policy Research in 2011. That last acquisition brought the Rutgers connection full circle, absorbing a research center that had operated on the same campus where Transaction had been based since 1969.

• 6. Sale to Taylor and Francis

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  Transaction's independent run ended in 2016, when the company was sold to Taylor & Francis. The formal operational merger took effect on the 1st of February 2017, at which point Transaction Publishers became part of Routledge, the Taylor & Francis imprint that specializes in academic and scholarly titles. The merger folded Transaction's catalogue of more than 6,000 titles into one of the largest academic publishing groups in the world. The Routledge imprint, which now carries what Transaction built, traces its own origins back to nineteenth-century London, a lineage as far removed from a Ford Foundation grant at Washington University in St. Louis as could be imagined.