Bloomsbury purchase Arden Shakespeare
Bloomsbury, publisher of the Harry Potter books, has snapped up one of the best-known providers of classroom English texts, the Arden Shakespeare, as it looks for growth now that JK Rowling has written her last book about the boy wizard.
Buying Arden will see the imprint reunited with its original creators, Methuen. The British publishing firm launched the Arden series – named after Shakespeare’s mother, Mary Arden, and the Forest of Arden, near his birthplace of Stratford-upon-Avon, which is the setting for As You Like It – with the publication of Hamlet in 1899.
That first complete collection of Shakespeare’s plays took 25 years to complete and they were then updated between the end of the second world war and the 1980s and quickly became the gold standard as they bring together not just the latest literary criticism on individual texts but copious commentaries. The third series of The Arden Shakespeare, which was launched in 1995, is currently nearing completion.
Bloomsbury refused to give details of what price it paid Cengage for the Arden business, saying only that the figure was “not material” to the group as a whole, which recorded sales of £75m for 2006 – the last year for which annual results are published – and a profit of just over £5m.
The deal, however, is part of Bloomsbury’s search for new areas of growth after the stellar success of the seven Harry Potter books, which have sold more than 400m copies and been translated into 67 languages.
Joanne Rowling, better known and indeed, EXTREMELY well known around the world as JK Rowling was born in the town of Yate, South Gloucestershire in 1965. She is the most successful literary author of all time and her world-famous Harry Potter series has so far sold a staggering 380,000,000 copies worldwide and has been translated into over sixty different languages.
Source: Guardian.co.uk
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Posted: January 10th, 2009
Author: Lee
Categories: JK Rowling
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