Harcourt (publisher)

Harcourt was a United States publishing firm with a long history of publishing fiction and nonfiction for children and adults. The company was based in San Diego, California, with Editorial / Sales / Marketing / Rights offices in New York City and Orlando, Florida.

In 2007, the U.S. Schools Education and Trade Publishing parts of Harcourt Education were sold by Reed Elsevier to Houghton Mifflin Riverdeep Group.Harcourt Assessment and Harcourt Education International were acquired by Pearson, the international education and information company, in January 2008. Houghton Mifflin acquired Harcourt in 2007, and assumed the Harcourt name in the Houghton Mifflin name to form Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. As of 2012, all Harcourt books that have been rereleased are now under the Houghton Mifflin Harcourt name, while the Harcourt Children's Books division left the name intact on all of its books under that name as part of HMH.

History

World Book Company (1905)

The first-created component of what would eventually become Harcourt was the World Book Company (unrelated to the Chicago-based World Book, Inc. publisher of reference works), which opened its first office in Manila in 1905 and published English-language educational materials for schools in the Philippines. The company later moved to New York, where it became a test publisher. Much of the company's success was based on the work of Arthur S. Otis, who was best known for the intelligence tests he developed for the U.S. Army. Millions of World War I draftees took Otis's tests.