Julian Messner

Julian Messner, Inc. was an American publishing house founded in 1933. Its best-selling books included 1956's Peyton Place. In the 1960s it became a division of Simon & Schuster, and continued as a children's imprint into the 1990s.

History

Julian Messner, previously an executive with Boni & Liveright, and his wife Kathryn founded the firm in 1933, opening an office on West 40th Street in Manhattan, and planning to publish juvenile books along with a small offering of adult books.^[1] They published four books in their first year, including Senator Marlowe's Daughter by Frances Parkinson Keyes.^[1]

When Julian Messner died in 1948, Kathryn (they divorced in 1944) became president. At first the idea of a woman president caused concern, and the board appointed a vice-president in charge of the president, an anomaly which soon became clear was not needed. She served as president until her death in August 1964; ^[2][3] the company was sold by the end of the year to Pocket Books.^[4] Pocket was then acquired by Simon & Schuster in 1966, during the 1960s wave of consolidation in the publishing industry.^[5]

"Julian Messner" continued as a children's imprint under Simon & Schuster. The imprint later fell under MacMillan Library Reference (S&S had acquired MacMillan, Inc., in 1994, and Pearson acquired the educational, professional, and reference businesses of S&S in 1998), and shut down six children's imprints including Julian Messner in 1999.^[6][7]

In 1958, the company published a fictionalized biography of baseball player Warren Spahn for young readers, which was full of incorrect information and even positive false claims (such as claiming that Spahn had won a Bronze Star, which was untrue). Spahn prevailed in a lawsuit against Messner, which is a leading case in the concept of false light, a claim related to defamation.^[8][9]

References