Bobbs-Merrill Company

The Bobbs-Merrill Company was founded in Indianapolis in 1903 and became one of the most important publishing houses in the USA. In 1958 the firm was purchased by Howard W. Sams, and in 1985 all the Sams businesses were acquired by Macmillan, Inc., which decided to discontinue the Bobbs-Merrill operation. The following paragraph is taken from 'The encyclopedia of Indianapolis', edited by David J. Bodenhamer and Robert G. Barrows, p. 337: "Macmillan was itself acquired in 1988 by the London-based Maxwell Communications Corporation, and Sams and Que were merged. Shortly before Robert Maxwell drowned in a boating accident, with colossal consequences for his gigantic publishing empire, the Indianapolis entity was sold to Paramount Communications (owners of the movie studio). By then, Paramount owned both the Simon and Schuster and the Prentice Hall publishing houses. The Indianapolis company then became Prentice Hall Computer Publishing, a part of Simon and Schuster ...". See the FOB entry for Prentice Hall, which indicates that the firm was sold by Simon & Schuster to the Pearson Group in 1998 and is now an imprint of Pearson Education. See www.pearsoned.com.