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Parent company | Savvas Learning Company |
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Founded | 1913 |
Founder | Charles Gerstenberg and Richard Ettinger |
Country of origin | United States |
Headquarters location | |
Publication types | Books |
Official website | prenticehall |
Prentice Hall is an American major educational publisher owned by Savvas Learning Company. Prentice Hall publishes print and digital content for the 6-12 and higher-education market. Prentice Hall distributes its technical titles through the Safari Books Online e-reference service.
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.[1] Prentice Hall became known as a publisher of trade books by authors such as Norman Vincent Peale; elementary, secondary, and college textbooks; loose-leaf information services; and professional books.[2]
Prentice Hall was acquired by Gulf+Western in 1984, and became part of that company's publishing division Simon & Schuster.[3] S&S sold several Prentice Hall subsidiaries: Deltak and Resource Systems were sold to National Education Center.[4] Reston Publishing was closed.[5]
In 1989, Prentice Hall Information Services was sold to Macmillan Inc..[6] 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.[7] Publication of trade books ended in 1991.[8] In 1994, Gulf+Western successor Paramount was sold to Viacom.[9] Prentice Hall Legal & Financial Services was sold to CSC Networks and CDB Infotek. Wolters Kluwer acquired Prentice Hall Law & Business.[10] Simon & Schuster's educational division, including Prentice Hall, was sold to Savvas Learning Company by G+W successor Viacom in 1998.
Prentice Hall is the publisher of Magruder's American Government as well as Biology by Ken Miller and Joe Levine. Their artificial intelligence series includes Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach by Stuart J. Russell and Peter Norvig and ANSI Common Lisp by Paul Graham. They also published the well-known computer programming book The C Programming Language by Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie and Operating Systems: Design and Implementation by Andrew S. Tanenbaum. Other titles include Dennis Nolan's Big 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, and The Joy of Chickens (1981).
A Prentice Hall subsidiary, Reston Publishing, 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 of People'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.