PENGUIN AGREES TO BUY NEW AMERICAN LIBRARY (original) (raw)
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- Oct. 1, 1986
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Less than a week after a German publisher agreed to buy Doubleday, the Penguin Publishing Company of London has agreed to buy New American Library and its hard-cover affiliate, E. P. Dutton. The agreement, announced yesterday, will give Penguin a vastly expanded presence in the United States, and should provide the two American companies much broader access to international markets.
Terms of the sale were not disclosed.
''In an ever more competitive publishing world, we need the added international muscle that this sale will give us, and it assures the future for our company and for our authors,'' said Robert G. Diforio, chairman of New American Library.
Penguin Publishing, a major publisher in Britain and the Commonwealth, is also the operating parent of Viking Penguin in New York. It is owned by Pearson P.L.C., a diversified holding company that owns The Financial Times newspaper and 50 percent of The Economist magazine.
''We've been a growing force in the U.S. but our position there is still disproportionately small, so this should increase our strength considerably,'' said Peter Mayer, chief executive officer of Penguin. As for New American Library and Dutton, Mr. Mayer, an American, said that the acquisition would enable them to take advantage of Penguin's strength in selling books throughout much of the world. Growing Foreign Ownership
Both NAL and Penguin in the United States publish a wide range of paperback books. But Mr. Mayer, speaking from Germany, where he was attending the Frankfurt Book Fair, said that Penguin publishes primarily trade paperbacks (the higher-priced paperbacks sold mainly in bookstores) whereas NAL publishes mostly mass-market paperbacks (rack-size books sold in a variety of retail outlets). He acknowledged some overlap in the Penguin Classics and Signet Classics lines, saying that would be the subject of further marketing studies.
If approved, the acquisition would accelerate the growing foreign ownership of American book publishing. Bertelsmann A.G., which last week agreed to pay more than $475 million for Doubleday & Company, a third-generation family-owned house, acquired sole interest in Bantam Books in 1981. It owns more than 30 publishing houses worldwide. Last year, the Holtzbrinck Group of Stuttgart, West Germany, bought Holt, Rinehart & Winston (now Henry Holt) from CBS Inc. The American arm of Fromm International, another West German publisher, has a small presence in New York. And several British, French and Italian publishers are known to be interested in acquiring American publishing houses.
Mr. Mayer said Penguin was interested three years ago in acquiring New American Library, ''but the Odyssey group was there before we could make a bid.'' Odyssey Partners is a private investing group in New York. To shore up its strength in hard-cover publishing, New American Library last year bought Dutton, an independent publishing house founded in 1832.
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