Westview Press

• 1. Introduction

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  Westview Press, founded by Frederick A. Praeger in Boulder, Colorado in 1975, focused on textbooks from the very start. Praeger stayed close to the operation; his name appears in the record of the company's book series through 1990. Then in 1991, the publishing firm bearing Praeger's name sold Westview to a company called SCS. That sale launched a succession of ownership changes that would test whether a specialist textbook press could find a stable home inside the world of major commercial publishing.

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• 2. An Uncomfortable Fit

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  SCS owned Westview for four years before selling it to HarperCollins in 1995. The two organizations discovered quickly that they were poorly matched. HarperCollins and Westview operated from very different corporate cultures and values, and those differences made working together genuinely difficult. Perseus stepped in and purchased Westview from HarperCollins in March 1998. Under Perseus, the press would remain for nearly two decades.

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• 3. From Perseus Forward

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  Perseus held Westview for nearly eighteen years, longer than any other owner in the press's history. In April 2016, Hachette Book Group acquired Perseus Books Group's publishing operations in their entirety, with Westview among them. The arrangement under Hachette lasted less than a year. In 2017, Hachette's Perseus Books Group division sold the press to Taylor & Francis. That transaction gave Westview its sixth corporate home, in a publishing life stretching across more than four decades.

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