Abrams International Incorporated history

After service with the 1st Cavalry Division at Fort Bliss, Texas, he joined the newly created 1st Armored Division and became a captain in 1940.

Founded by Harry N. Abrams in 1949, the company was the first in this country to specialize in the creation and distribution of art books.

He began with a staff of only five, and in 1950 brought out three illustrated books on solidly world-famous artists Renoir, van Gogh, and El Greco.

The two men hit it off, and starting in 1952 Landshoff worked to buy European titles for Abrams and to sell Abrams' list abroad.

By 1957, the young publishing company had put out approximately 200 titles, and its revenue had reached $1 million.

Abrams raised money around 1960 by selling shares to a private investment group, procuring approximately half a million dollars.

Abrams published a lasting bestseller in 1962, a textbook by Janson called The History of Art.

The firm began negotiations as early as 1963 with Times-Mirror, a Los Angeles publishing firm principally known for its newspapers.

The deal was completed in 1966, with Abrams still running the company.

In April 1967 Abrams, by then a four-star general and vice chief of staff of the army, was named deputy to Gen.

On July 2, 1968, after Westmoreland was appointed army chief of staff, Abrams succeeded him as top commander of all United States forces in the Vietnam theatre.

To give time for Vietnamization to succeed, he was put in charge of the United States–South Vietnamese incursions into Cambodia and Laos in 1970–71.

In 1972 he succeeded Westmoreland once again, becoming army chief of staff in Washington, D.C. In that role he wrestled with the mounting antimilitary backlash prevalent at the end of the Vietnam War and began to implement the transition to an all-volunteer force.

Harry Abrams retired from the firm he had founded in 1977.

1980: Paul Gottlieb becomes president.

In a meeting with the Junta’s ambassador in Washington on December 3, 1982, Abrams suggested that the dictatorship could “improve its image” by creating a process with the Catholic Church of returning the children, some of whom were born in secret torture chambers, to their legitimate families.

According to Publisher's Weekly (January 18, 1985), Abrams had another reason for wanting to sell the company.

In 1987, Abrams won the right to exclusively distribute worldwide the exhibition catalogs and related works from the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Another museum-inspired book was the 1988 David Hockney: A Retrospective, which it published jointly with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

In 1993 when Congress planned to investigate the Reagan administration’s role in human rights abuses in El Salvador an indignant Abrams’ called it “a reprehensible McCarthyite charge,” while also saying that, “The Administration’s record on El Salvador is one of fabulous achievement.”

Times-Mirror's new chairman, Mark Willes, who took over in 1995, was reconfiguring the media conglomerate, and he decided to axe any subsidiaries that could not promise a 12 percent return on investment.

Abrams was sold in 1997 to La Martiniere Groupe of France.

In 1999, Abrams debuted a dozen children's titles under the new imprint.

The contents of this meeting were recorded in a memo Abrams wrote, which was declassified by the State Department in 2002 and is now a key piece of evidence against former junta officials in this high profile trial.