Prentice-Hall

About Prentice-Hall

Prentice-Hall was an American publisher, founded in 1913, best known for educational and professional textbooks, which also issued some notable trade titles and which was defunct as a brand by 2020.

The company was started on 13 October 1913 by Charles Gerstenberg, a law professor, and his student Richard Ettinger, who named it after their mothers' maiden names, Prentice and Hall. Its later headquarters were in New Jersey, latterly Hoboken.

Alongside its textbook list it published general books, including Norman Vincent Peale's The Power of Positive Thinking (October 1952) and the anonymous Go Ask Alice (1971). Its technical list included Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie's The C Programming Language, Andrew S. Tanenbaum's Operating Systems: Design and Implementation and Stuart Russell and Peter Norvig's Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach.

Gulf+Western bought Prentice-Hall in 1984 and placed it within Simon & Schuster. Gulf+Western's successor, Paramount, passed to Viacom in 1994, and in 1998 Viacom sold Simon & Schuster's educational business, including Prentice Hall, to Pearson. Pearson sold its US schools publishing in 2019 (renamed Savvas Learning), and by May 2020 the imprint was defunct, with its lists passing to successors including Pearson, Savvas, Simon & Schuster and Wolters Kluwer.