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| Status | Defunct |
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| Founded | October 13, 1913; 111 years ago (1913-10-13) |
| Founder |
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| Defunct | May 2020; 4 years ago (2020-05) |
| Successor | Simon & Schuster (trade titles);CSC (financial);Wolters Kluwer (legal);Pearson (higher education); Savvas Learning (K-12 education) |
| Country of origin | United States |
| Headquarters location | Hoboken, New Jersey, U.S. |
| Publication types |
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| Official website | www |
Prentice Hall was a major Americaneducational publisher.[1] It published print and digital content for the 6–12 and higher-education market. It was an independent company throughout the bulk of the twentieth century. In its last few years it was owned by, then absorbed into, Savvas Learning Company.[2] In the Web era, it distributed its technical titles through theSafari Books Online e-reference service for some years.
On October 13, 1913, law professor Charles Gerstenberg and his student Richard Ettinger founded Prentice Hall. Gerstenberg and Ettinger took their mothers' maiden names, Prentice and Hall, to name their new company.[3] At the time the name was usually styled asPrentice-Hall (as seen for example on manytitle pages), per an orthographic norm forcoordinate elements within such compounds (compare alsoMcGraw-Hill with later styling asMcGraw Hill). Prentice-Hall became known as a publisher of trade books by authors such asNorman Vincent Peale; elementary, secondary, and college textbooks; loose-leaf information services; and professional books.[1] Prentice-Hall acquired the training provider Deltak in 1979.[1]
Prentice-Hall was acquired byGulf+Western in 1984, and became part of that company's publishing divisionSimon & Schuster.[4] S&S sold several Prentice-Hall subsidiaries: Deltak and Resource Systems were sold toNational Education Center.[5] Reston Publishing was closed.[6]
In 1989, Prentice Hall Information Services was sold toMacmillan Inc.[7] In 1990, Prentice Hall Press, a trade book publisher, was moved to Simon & Schuster Trade and Prentice Hall's reference & travel was moved to Simon & Schuster's mass market unit.[8] Publication of trade books ended in 1991.[9] In 1994, Gulf+Western successor Paramount was sold toViacom.[10] Prentice Hall Legal & Financial Services was sold toCSC Networks and CDB Infotek.Wolters Kluwer acquired Prentice Hall Law & Business.[11] Simon & Schuster's educational division, including Prentice Hall, was sold toPearson plc by G+W successorViacom in 1998. Subsequently, Pearson absorbed Prentice Hall's higher education and technical reference titles intoPearson Education. Pearson sold its K-12 educational publishing in the United States in 2019; the division was renamed Savvas Learning. K-12 and school titles of Prentice Hall were absorbed into Savvas Learning along with Prentice Hall web domains which redirected to Savvas Learning homepage and the trademarks for Prentice Hall were transferred to Savvas Learning Company.[12][13]
Prentice Hall is the publisher ofMagruder's American Government as well asBiology byKen Miller and Joe Levine, andSociology andSociety: The Basics by John Macionis. Theirartificial intelligence series includesArtificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach byStuart J. Russell andPeter Norvig andANSI Common Lisp byPaul Graham. They also published the well-known computer programming bookThe C Programming Language byBrian Kernighan andDennis Ritchie andOperating Systems: Design and Implementation byAndrew S. Tanenbaum. Winthrop Publishers, a Cambridge, Massachusetts–based subsidiary of Prentice Hall,[14] published a series of books on programming beginning in the mid-1970s that was edited byRichard W. Conway.[15] Other titles include Dennis Nolan'sBig Pig (1976),Monster Bubbles: A Counting Book (1976),Alphabrutes (1977),Wizard McBean and his Flying Machine (1977),Witch Bazooza (1979),Llama Beans (1979, with author Charles Keller), andThe Joy of Chickens (1981).
A Prentice Hall subsidiary, Reston Publishing,[16][17] was in the foreground of technical-book publishing when microcomputers were first becoming available. It was still unclear who would be buying and using "personal computers", and the scarcity of useful software and instruction created a publishing market niche whose target audience yet had to be defined. In the spirit of the pioneers who made PCs possible, Reston Publishing's editors addressed non-technical users with the reassuring, and mildly experimental,Computer Anatomy for Beginners by Marlin Ouverson ofPeople's Computer Company. They followed with a collection of books that was generally by and for programmers, building a stalwart list of titles relied on by many in the first generation of microcomputers users.
With revenues of $390.6 million last year, it boasts that it is the country's largest college textbook publisher and second-largest producer of loose-leaf information services dealing with taxation and regulation, one of the three largest publishers of professional books, and one of the dozen largest publishers of textbooks for elementary and secondary schools.
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