A&AP has just been taken over for the third time, and is now owned by the French backed British publishing house Orion Publishing. Lionel Leventhal founded A&AP in 1966 and sold it to Link House Books (who owned six other publishing houses, including Blandford Press) in 1984. Link House Books was part of the Link House Group, who owned newspapers and magazines such as Exchange & Mart, and were then bought by United Newspapers. The Link House Books company became a minute percentage of the whole business, not in their main area of interests, and in 1986 Link House Books was sold to Cassell. Over the years Cassell bought and sold a number of publishing houses but, according to stock market standards, generally under-performed, and a few weeks ago Macmillan UK (owned by a German publishing company) bid for the Cassell shares, which had been quoted on the stock market at 42.5 pence each. Macmillan bid 100 pence, but after two weeks Orion intervened and the shares went to 125 pence. Orion Publishing own Weidenfeld and Nicolson, Orion Books and Phoenix. Their authors include Maeve Binchy and Penny Vincenzi. 71.5 percent of Orion is owned by Hachette, the major French book publishing house. This deal makes Orion the sixth or seventh largest publishing house in Britain, with a combined turnover of about £ 60 million. A&AP is a very, very small portion of that, and there will inevitably be a question as to whether it fits their general trade requirements. Orion is quoted in the book trade press as saying that it is intended to 'generate economies of scale'. Back to Greenhill Military Book News No. 87 Table of Contents Back to Greenhill Military Book News List of Issues Back to Master Magazine List © Copyright 1998 by Greenhill Books This article appears in MagWeb (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other military history articles and gaming articles are available at http://www.magweb.com