Elsevier Mdl history

The beginnings of Reed International date to 1894, when Albert Reed bought Upper Tovil paper mill at Maidstone, Kent.

To save it they decided to relaunch it in 1904 for a general readership as an all-picture paper, using a new grade of fine newsprint introduced by Reed.

Newsprint remained the company's chief product, but from 1929 onward Reed also made kraft paper from which it produced corrugated board and paper sacks.

Sir Ralph Reed had retired in 1954, ending the era of family control, and his most able colleague, Clifford Sheldon, had died a few years earlier.

In 1958 he bought Amalgamated Press, the magazine group founded by his uncles, then Associated Iliffe Press, and finally Odhams Press.

When the Mirror and Pictorial companies became the International Publishing Corporation (IPC) in 1963, it was by far the largest publishing group in the United Kingdom.

In 1968, on the front page of the Daily Mirror, King demanded the prime minister's resignation.

As IPC still owned 27 percent of Reed, and Ryder could not allow it to fall into unfriendly hands, he and Cudlipp agreed in 1970 that Reed should take over IPC.

In 1975--76 the company's profits fell by more than 50 percent, and in the next few years made only a partial recovery.

Only in 1978 did the company recognize that the expansion policy initiated by Ryder had failed in the long run.

In 1984 Reed decided to float them as a separate company. 'National newspapers do not sit easily in a large commercial corporation,' said Carpenter.

Gordon Publications of Morris Plains, New Jersey, acquired in 1985, issued nearly 20 product news publications.

Elsevier Realty Information, Inc. (ERI), of Bethesda, Maryland, was an amalgamation of Redi and Damar, two companies acquired in 1988.

In 1989 alone, for example, Elsevier Science Publishers added another 30 titles to its list of periodicals, most of them acquired rather than newly launched.

In April 1990 the two groups announced that they would not proceed with any further moves toward merging because of the legal and fiscal problems such moves would bring.

In 1991 Elsevier added to its list of subsidiaries the biggest single acquisition it had ever made, the British scientific publisher Pergamon Press, which it intended to maintain separately from Elsevier Science Publishers.

In 1992 Davis made his boldest move yet by engineering a merger with the Dutch publisher Elsevier N.V., which was then the world's leading publisher of scientific journals.

The most noteworthy dispute came in 1994 when Davis resigned in a power struggle won by the Dutch.

As a result, newspaper businesses in the Netherlands and the United Kingdom and consumer magazines in the United States and the Netherlands were sold in five separate transactions for $1.1 billion in late 1995.