Pan Macmillan

About Pan Macmillan

Pan Macmillan is the British trade publishing arm of Macmillan, formed by about 1990 when the paperback house Pan Books merged with Macmillan's general trade division, and it is owned by the German Holtzbrinck Publishing Group.

Macmillan was founded in London in 1843 by Daniel and Alexander Macmillan, brothers from the Isle of Arran. In the nineteenth century it published Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865), Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book (1894), and work by Christina Rossetti, Tennyson and Thomas Hardy, and it launched the journal Nature in 1869.

Alan Bott started Pan Books in 1944, and a consortium of houses including Macmillan, Collins and Heinemann later bought it out. Alongside Penguin it pioneered popular paperbacks in Britain, and Ian Fleming's James Bond novels first came out in British paperback under the Pan name. Macmillan had full ownership of Pan by 1987 (sources give 1986 or 1987). Holtzbrinck has owned Pan Macmillan outright since 1999.

Pan Macmillan's imprints include Macmillan, Pan, Picador, Mantle, Tor, Bluebird, Macmillan Children's Books, Two Hoots and the Macmillan Collector's Library. Books it first published include Ken Follett's The Pillars of the Earth (Macmillan, 1989) and Adrian Tchaikovsky's Children of Time (Tor UK, 2015), which won the 2016 Arthur C. Clarke Award. Macmillan Publishers has its headquarters in London.

How to spot a Pan Macmillan first edition