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Pantheon Books
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Pantheon Books is an American imprint with editorial independence that is part of the Knopf Publishing Group, which was acquired by Random House in 1960.
The current editor-in-chief at Pantheon Books is Dan Frank.
elsmann AG, the German company that also owns Bantam Books, Doubleday Publishing, Dell Publishing, Times Books, the Modern Library, Everyman's Library, Vintage Books, Crown Publishing Group, Schocken Books, Ballantine Books, Random House, Del Rey Books, Fawcett Publications also acquired Random House in 1998, making Bertelsmann the largest publisher of American books.
In addition to classics, international fiction, and trade paperbacks, recently Pantheon has moved aggressively into the comics market.
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Encyclopedia
Pantheon Books is an American imprint with editorial independence that is part of the Knopf Publishing Group, which was acquired by Random House in 1960.
The current editor-in-chief at Pantheon Books is Dan Frank.
Overview
Bertelsmann AG, the German company that also owns Bantam Books, Doubleday Publishing, Dell Publishing, Times Books, the Modern Library, Everyman's Library, Vintage Books, Crown Publishing Group, Schocken Books, Ballantine Books, Random House, Del Rey Books, Fawcett Publications also acquired Random House in 1998, making Bertelsmann the largest publisher of American books.
In addition to classics, international fiction, and trade paperbacks, recently Pantheon has moved aggressively into the comics market. It has published many critically acclaimed graphic novels and comics collections, including Ice Haven, La Perdida, Read Yourself RAW, Maus, In the Shadow of No Towers, and Black Hole. Many of its comics publications are high-quality collected editions of works originally serialized by other publishers such as Fantagraphics Books.
History
Pantheon Books was founded in 1942 in New York City by European intellectuals who had come to the United States to escape fascism and the Holocaust. Important early works published by Pantheon were Zen and the Art of Archery by German scholar Eugen Herrigel, the Bollingen series (composed of C.G. Jung's collected works in English and books of noted Jungian scholars), the first complete translation of the I Ching, and Boris Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago.
When Random House bought Alfred A. Knopf in 1960, the front page of the New York Times reported that the merger "united two of the nation's most celebrated publishers of quality writing" The following year, Random House would buy Pantheon, which would be moved into the Knopf Publishing Group. Also in 1961, Pantheon hired Andre Schiffrin as executive editor of Pantheon Books.
Under the direction of Schiffrin, Pantheon continued to publish important works by European writers such as The Tin Drum by Günter Grass, who would later receive a Nobel Prize for his work; Madness and Civilization by Michel Foucault, The Lover by Marguerite Duras, and Adieux by Simone de Beauvoir. By the late 1960s, Pantheon started to bring American writers such as Noam Chomsky, James Loewen and Studs Terkel to European readers. In 1965, RCA bought Random House. Throughout the 1970s, Pantheon continued to publish intellectual and often leftist works of fiction and nonfiction "without a profit-and-loss sheet in sight". In other words, Pantheon editors prided themselves on subsidizing the cost of publishing less commercially successful (but socially or intellectually important) works with the profits from more commercially successful books.
In 1980, RCA sold Random House to Samuel Irving Newhouse, Jr., and Pantheon Books came under pressure to increase profits.
In early 2009, long-time Pantheon publisher Janice Goldklang was laid off as part of a general restructuring of Random House and its publishing divisions.
Controversies
Pantheon and Random House which, at the time, was owned by SI Newhouse, were plagued with controversy throughout the late 1980s and early 1990s. In December 1989, Alberto Vitale, a former banker, replaced Robert L. Berstein as chairman and president of Random House. In February 1990, Schiffrin was "asked to resign after he refused to reduce the number of titles published [by Pantheon] or to trim Pantheon's 30-member staff". In protest of Schiffrin's forced resignation and other changes in staffing, such as the hiring of Erroll McDonald, editors and staff Tom Englehardt, David Sternbach, Helena Franklin, Diane Wachtel, Gay Salisbury, and several others resigned in the following months. Authors of books published by Pantheon, Random House, and other related imprints, including Studs Terkel, Kurt Vonnegut Jr., and Oliver Sacks, held a protest outside of Random House in March of 1990 during which they argued that the termination of Schiffrin amounted to corporate censorship of the books that would not be printed without him. Novelist E.L. Doctorow used his acceptance speech for a fiction prize at the March 1990 National Book Critics Circle award ceremony to criticize Random House for ousting Schiffrin.
In the week following the protests, forty Random House editors and publishers signed a statement that defended the personnel changes at Pantheon, stating: "like Pantheon, we abhor corporate censorship. We have never experienced it, nor do we believe that Pantheon has ever experienced it. We would not tolerate censorship of any form, and we are offended by any suggestion to the contrary. But, unlike Pantheon, we have preserved our independence and the independence of our authors by supporting the integrity of our publishing programs with fiscal responsibility". Another supporter of Schiffrin's termination wrote that the protests and resignations were "a hilarious specimen of people intoxicated by self-importance. It also is a case study of the descent of intellectuals' leftism into burlesque".
In 1998, Random House made news again when it was bought by Bertelsmann. The Authors Guild approached the Fair Trade Commission, arguing that "the $1.4 billion acquisition of Random House by Bantam's parent, Bertelsmann A.G., the German media conglomerate, would create a 'new economic behemoth' with the potential to restrict readers' choices and authors' ability to market their works". Bertelsmann was allowed to make the purchase, however, making it the largest publisher of English-language trade books. Again, Schiffrin protested, noting that in the eight years since Random House had come under the direction of Vitale, "Random House's 'high end'—the literary translations and books of criticism, cultural history and political analysis that had built the reputation of the Knopf and Pantheon imprints—were being sacrificed" and that concerns for the "bottom line" would outweigh intellectual and social concerns.
Schiffrin published a memoir in 2000, in which he explains his side of the controversies surrounding Pantheon and Random House called The Business of Books: How International Conglomerates Took Over Publishing and Changed the Way We Read, in which he accused Vitale and those with money-making interests of homogenizing the publishing industry by focusing too much on profits and warns, "the resulting control on the spread of ideas is stricter than anyone would have though possible in a free society". In a 2003 interview, former Pantheon editor Tom Englehardt reflects on the Pantheon controversy in light of the acquisition by Bertelsmann: "Pantheon was a very specific place, publishing a very specific kind of book, and we felt that was being wiped out. As it turned out, what happened at Pantheon was the beginning of the gargantuan feasting on the independent publishing house and not-so-independent houses as well"
Pantheon Today
Pantheon continues to publish well respected fiction and non-fiction, and has more recently expanded further into graphic novels. Pantheon published a graphic-based "for beginners" series in the 1970s and 1980s, and decided to bring the series back in 2003. One of the first graphic novels Pantheon published was the highly acclaimed Maus: A Survivor's Tale by Art Spiegelman in 1986. Spiegelman has become somewhat of a comics consultant, advising editor-in-chief Dan Frank. In 2005, Pantheon published The Acme Novelty Library by Chris Ware. That same year, Pantheon published The Rabbi's Cat, a graphic novel by Joann Sfar which "tells the wholly unique story of a rabbi, his daughter, and their talking cat".
Books published by Pantheon in 2007 that are doing well (ranked by number of holdings in libraries according to OCLC Worldcat) are: The Good Husband of Zebra Drive by Alexander McCall Smith, The Little Book of Plagiarism by Richard Posner, Bambi vs. Godzilla: On the Nature, Purpose, and Practice of the Movie Business by David Mamet, and Toussaint Louverture: A Biography by Madison Smartt Bell.
Selected Pantheon Publications
(Titles retrieved from by searching for "Pantheon Books" in the publisher field and ranking results by number of library holdings and publication year; this is a sampling; not all results are included.)
Literature and criticism
- Force and Freedom: Reflections on History by Jacob Burckhardt (1943)
- The World is Not Enough, A Novel by Zoé Oldenbourg (1948)
- The I Ching; Or, Book of Changes translated by Richard Wilhelm and Cary F. Baynes (1950))
- Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak (1959)
- The Tin Drum by Günter Grass (1963)
- Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason by Michel Foucault (1965)
- Division Street: America by Studs Terkel (1967)
- American Power and the New Mandarins by Noam Chomsky (1969)
- At War with Asia by Noam Chomsky (1970)
- Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression by Studs Terkel (1970)
- The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences by Michel Foucault (1970)
- Problems of Knowledge and Freedom by Noam Chomsky (1971)
- The Archaeology of Knowledge by Michel Foucault (1972)
- For Reasons of State by Noam Chomsky (1973)
- Peace in the Middle East: Reflections on Justice and Nationhood by Noam Chomsky (1974)
- Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do by Studs Terkel (1974)
- Mississippi: Conflict & Change by James Loewen and Charles Sallis (1974)
- Reflections on Language by Noam Chomsky (1975)
- Sound Effects: Youth, Leisure, and the Politics of Rock'n'Roll by Simon Frith (1981)
- When Things of the Spirit Come First: Five Early Tales by Simone de Beauvoir (1982)
- The Empire's Old Clothes: What the Lone Ranger, Babar, and Other Innocent Heroes Do to Our Minds by Ariel Dorfman (1983)
- Adieux: A Farewell to Sartre by Simone de Beauvoir (1984)
- After The Second Sex: Conversations with Simone De Beauvoir by Alice Schwarzer and Simone de Beauvoir (1984)
- The Lover by Marguerite Duras (1985)
- Women Writing About Men by Jane Miller (1986)
- The Woman Destroyed by Simone de Beauvoir (1987)
- The Sadeian Woman and the Ideology of Pornography by Angela Carter (1988)
- Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky
- The Death of Rhythm & Blues by Nelson George (1988)
- On Record: Rock, Pop, and the Written Word by Simon Frith and Andrew Goodwin (1990)
- Stop the Violence: Overcoming Self Destruction by Nelson George (1990)
- Felix: The Twisted Tale of the World's Most Famous Cat by John Canemaker (1991)
- Rhythm Oil: A Journey Through the Music of the American South by Stanely Booth (1991)
- The Birth of the Beat Generation: Visionaries, Rebels, and Hipsters, 1944-1960 by Steven Watson (1995)
- Deep Sightings and Rescue Missions: Fiction, Essays, and Conversations by Toni Cade Bambara and Toni Morrison (1996)
- In the Country of Country: People and Places in American Music by Nicholas Dawidoff (1997)
- Holy Clues: Investigating Life's Mysteries with Sherlock Holmes by Stephen Kendrick (1999)
- Parallels and Paradoxes: Explorations in Music and Society by Daniel Barenboim, Edward W. Said, and Ara Guzelimian (2002)
- Boogaloo: The Quintessence of American Popular Music by Arthur Kempton (2003)
- The End of Blackness: Returning the Souls of Black Folk to Their Rightful Owners by Debra Dickerson (2004)
- Give our Regards to the Atomsmashers! Writers on Comics by Sean Howe (2004)
- Shakespeare After All by Marjorie B Garber (2004)
- Tango: The Art History of Love by Robert Farris Thompson (2005)
- On Michael Jackson by Margo Jefferson (2006)
- The Good Husband of Zebra Drive by Alexander McCall Smith (2007)
- The Little Book of Plagiarism by Alexander Posner (2007)
- Bambi vs. Godzilla: On the Nature, Purpose, and Practice of the Movie Business by David Mamet (2007)
- Toussant Louverture: A Biography by Madison Smartt Bell (2007)
- The Father of all Things: A Marine, His Son, and the Legacy of Vietnam by Tom Bissell (2007)
Selections from the Bollingen Series
Comics, "...for Beginners" books, and graphic novels
External links
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