Heinemann

About Heinemann

Heinemann is a London publishing house founded in 1890 by William Heinemann, whose trade list published H. G. Wells, Rudyard Kipling, Somerset Maugham and Graham Greene; the name now survives under several owners, including Penguin Random House.

The firm's first title, Hall Caine's novel The Bondman (1890), sold more than 450,000 copies. Sydney Pawling joined as a partner in 1893. Over the following decades the list included Wells, Kipling, W. Somerset Maugham, George Moore, Max Beerbohm and Henry James, and Graham Greene joined it in 1929. Its educational arm, Heinemann Educational Books, created the African Writers Series, with Chinua Achebe as its first advisory editor.

After William Heinemann's death in 1920, the American publisher Doubleday took a majority stake. The company later came under Thomas Tilling (sources differ between the 1950s and 1961), passed to Octopus in 1985 when BTR sold Tilling's non-industrial interests, and to Reed International in 1987. Random House bought the trade business in 1997. Macmillan Education bought the English-language-teaching list in 1998, and in 2007 the remaining educational businesses were split between Pearson and Houghton Mifflin. In the UK the trade name continues in Hutchinson Heinemann, formed by Penguin Random House in 2021.