Milestones

PRH is wholly owned by German multinational Bertelsmann, one of the world’s largest media companies. In 2002, Bertelsmann was forced to acknowledge its conduct during the Nazi era and its later attempts to cover up the truth: the Bertelsmann family patriarch, Heinrich Mohn, “had belonged to a circle of supporters who had donated money to the SS.” Furthermore, “far from resisting the Nazis, as it once claimed, Bertelsmann used its ties with the regime to transform itself from a provincial Lutheran printing company into a mass-market publisher.”

Mohn produced cheap, popular war-adventure books and “Bertelsmann Volksausgaben” or “people’s editions,” mostly read by Nazi soldiers, turning the company into a National Socialist model enterprise. It became “the largest supplier of books to the German Army.” Bertelsmann’s books were “replete with anti-Semitic themes,” including Bertelsmann’s religious literature, “which began to use Nazi terminology.”

An independent commission found that “Bertelsmann had probably also profited from Jewish slave labor at a handful of printing plants in Lithuania where it contracted work.” Bertelsmann’s revenues skyrocketed during the war, but the company was closed by Nazi officials in 1944 when it was suspected of illegally hoarding stockpiles of paper.

After the war, Bertelsmann portrayed itself to the Allies as a Christian publisher that had been part of the resistance to the Nazis, claiming to have been shut down because of their anti-Nazi stance and subversive publications. In 1945, Mohn was able to obtain a license to resume publishing from the British occupying force by maintaining that he had been a victim of the Nazis.

This fiction was actively promoted by company leaders well into the late 1990s as they covered up the truth and attempted to silence historians and others investigating their past. It allowed Bertelsmann to expand and acquire Random House, which later merged with Penguin, and become the largest book publisher in the world.

Somehow none of these details of its parent company’s heinous past make it onto PRH’s timeline of “great milestones in our company’s history.” The most controversial highlight from the 1930s and ’40s seems to be the acquisition of the racist Babar children’s books.

A more truthful history came to light in 1998 after the company’s then chairman, Thomas Middelhoff, asserted during a speech in New York “that the company had been shut down in 1944 because it had published books banned by the Nazis.” This retelling of the Bertelsmann myth was soon discredited by Hersch Fischler, who published articles exposing the company’s Nazi connections.

Faced with this public accusation, in late 1998 Bertelsmann appointed independent scholars to investigate discrepancies in the company’s account of its wartime history, resulting in a 794-page report published in 2000. In 2002, the chairman of Bertelsmann, Gunter Thielen, issued the following statement: “I would like to express our sincere regret for the inaccuracies the commission has uncovered in our previous corporate history of the World War II era, as well as for the wartime activities that have been brought to light.” He stopped short of an apology.

Untapped Market

Unfortunately, associations between publishing houses and far-right ideology are not confined to the history books. Around 2002, seeing a market that they hadn’t yet tapped and inspired by the success of conservative publisher Regnery, the top four of the Big Five began to aggressively court the Fox News market. Between 2002 and 2010, each set up a dedicated conservative imprint.

In 2002, Random House established Crown Forum (now just Forum) “as a way to inform and contribute to the national dialogue and political discourse.” Forum now boasts that it is “one of the leading publishers of politically conservative authors and points of view.” Their authors include Neil Gorsuch, Antonin Scalia, Charles Krauthammer, Jonah Goldberg, George Will, and Mary Katharine Ham.

Penguin set up Sentinel in 2003, which they describe as “a dedicated conservative imprint within Penguin Group [that] publishes a wide variety of right-of-center books on subjects like politics, history, public policy, culture, religion, and international relations.” The name “Sentinel,” we are told “symbolizes a tough-minded defense of America’s fundamental values and national interests.” Their roster includes Mike Huckabee, Marco Rubio, Ben Carson, Donald Rumsfeld, Nikki Haley, Ann Coulter, and Brian Kilmeade of Fox & Friends.

A year later, Hachette set up Center Street, whose authors include Donald Trump Jr, Pete Hegseth, Jeanine Pirro, Newt Gingrich, Vivek Ramaswamy, and Kristi Noem, followed in 2005 by Simon & Schuster’s Threshold. The Threshold mission statement explains that it is “proud to have published some of the most influential and controversial political leaders of our time,” including Dick Cheney, Donald Trump, Karl Rove, and John Bolton, not to mention “some of the most exciting and controversial broadcasters in media today,” such as Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, and Alex Marlow, editor in chief of Breitbart News Network.

More than fifty of these right-wing titles have been New York Times bestsellers, with many reaching the number-one spot, and several have sold over one million copies each. In 2010, HarperCollins tried to claim its share of the market with Broadside Books, publishing the likes of Peggy Noonan, Ron DeSantis, Christopher Rufo, Tomi Lahren, Jared Kushner, and Vivek Ramaswamy. In 2011, Broadside put out five short manifestos in a series called “Voices of the Tea Party.” In 2020, the Fox News Books brand was added to the Broadside imprint.

As the founding executive director of Broadside Books put it, they publish books by authors like Ann Coulter and Sean Hannity “whose aim is to whip the Republican base into a froth, and get rich in the process.” Each of the Big Five operates as part of what New York Times journalist Jim Rutenberg calls “the Incitement Industry.”

Cashing In

Conservatives sometimes complain that these right-wing imprints are meant to ghettoize their books, carving them off from the mainstream brands of big publishing houses that prefer to portray a more liberal image. It’s true that the major companies don’t want titles that promote misogyny and white supremacy to spoil the image of their regular literary output. And they will happily publish authors from the Left if they think the books will make them money.

Last year, PRH and its imprints published Heather Cox Richardson’s Democracy Awakening and Bernie Sanders’s It’s OK to Be Angry About Capitalism. They’ve also published titles like Unladylike: A Field Guide to Smashing the Patriarchy and Claiming Your Space; Road Map for Revolutionaries: Resistance, Activism, and Advocacy; and an activist kids’ book called Steal This Country: A Handbook for Resistance, Persistence, and Fixing Almost Everything.

The big publishers set up charities and scholarships and make bold claims about their climate impact. But what happens when these corporations go too far for readers and the progressive authors on their list? In late 2016, Simon & Schuster’s Threshold imprint did just that by awarding far-right media personality Milo Yiannopoulos a $250,000 contract for his book Dangerous.

People expressed their outrage on social media, the Chicago Review of Books and others called for a boycott, and Roxane Gay pulled her forthcoming book with Simon & Schuster’s TED Books imprint. Gay acknowledged that TED Books and Threshold were different imprints with different staffs and intended audiences, but the link between them through Simon & Schuster was still too much for her.

More than a hundred of the publishing house’s authors wrote a letter to CEO Carolyn Reidy requesting the publisher drop the title. Many of them said they didn’t want to be on the same payroll as Yiannopoulos and threatened to leave. After S&S finally cancelled Yiannopoulos’s hate-filled book, right-wing groups predictably protested about the chilling effects on democracy caused by not publishing it. (He later self-published.)

However, Yiannopoulos’s book wasn’t canceled because of his abhorrent politics (after all, the same imprint is the home of books by Rush Limbaugh, Dick Cheney, and Glenn Beck). S&S cancelled the book because of his abhorrent views on sex with minors, which made even right-wingers think twice about hosting him at their events. For Simon & Schuster, Yiannopoulos’s history of xenophobia, misogyny, and hate speech was not the problem. They could no longer see a way to profit from his work.

Since then, there have been several other high-profile examples of publishing staff, authors, and readers speaking out about specific editorial decisions, in some cases leading publishers to change course, but in others not. Following the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol, Simon & Schuster canceled an upcoming book by Senator Josh Hawley:

We did not come to this decision lightly. As a publisher it will always be our mission to amplify a variety of voices and viewpoints: at the same time we take seriously our larger public responsibility as citizens, and cannot support Senator Hawley after his role in what became a dangerous threat to our democracy and freedom,

In April 2021, more than 200 Simon and Schuster employees and 3,500 supporters submitted a petition to the company demanding that it stop making deals with authors tied to Donald Trump’s administration and cancel the multimillion-dollar deal for Mike Pence’s forthcoming memoir. Unmoved, S&S published Pence’s book in January 2024, followed in September by Vivek Ramaswamy’s Truths: The Future of America First.

Two days after the recent US election, Hachette announced the launch of a new US conservative imprint, Basic Liberty, led by Thomas Spence, former president of conservative publisher Regnery and a visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation, the right-wing think tank that coordinated the Project 2025 initiative. Despite a protest by Hachette staff, which led some to quit their jobs, the company shows no signs of changing its plans for the imprint.