Plon (publisher)

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Plon
File:Plon publisher logo.png
Parent company Editis
Status Active
Founded 1852[1]
Founder Henri Plon and his 2 brothers
Country of origin France
Headquarters location Paris, France[2]
Publication types Books

Plon is a French book publishing company, founded in 1852 by Henri Plon and his two brothers.

History

According to the family legend, the founder of the family is Jehan Plon, who came from Ploen or Plön (Germany) in the 16th century. After staying in Nivelles, he eventually settled in Mons (Belgium) and married the daughter of a typographer. From the 16th to the 18th century, his heirs were typographers and then printers, from Mons to Paris.

Henri Plon (1806–1872) started as an apprentice to the printer Firmin Didot and then to Théophile Belin, the son of François Belin, a printer in Sézanne (Marne). In 1833, Maximilien Béthune, printer at Vaugirard street, T. Belin and Henri Plon formed the company Béthune, Belin et Plon which was renamed in 1835 Béthune & Plon and became the reference printing house visited by Victor Hugo, Honoré de Balzac, Alphonse de Lamartine, Alexandre Dumas as well as the official printing house of the Emperor.

In the 1840's, success was found. Henri brought in his three brothers, Charles, Hippolyte and Louis-Charles, acquired the estate of Béthune, and formed the company Typographie des Abeilles, Plon Frères et Cie. In 1850, they were among the first in France to use the steam engine for printing, a process that came from England. At the beginning of the 1850s, the Plon company is mainly a printer, which does not hide its support to the new regime.[3]

In 1852, Henri and his brothers opened premises at 8 rue Garancière, which housed both a production workshop and a publishing house. At that time, the Plon brothers received the title of "bookseller-printers of the Emperor" and published the correspondences of Louis XIII, Marie-Antoinette and Napoleon, a catalog which ensured success.[4] Henri was also president of the Chamber of Printers and vice-president of the Bookstore Circle. His son Eugène Plon (1836–1895) associated in 1873 with his brother-in-law Louis-Robert Nourrit and Émile Perrin under the name Plon, Nourrit et Cie. Eugène was president of the Cercle de la librairie in the years 1870–80.

After the departure of Perrin in 1883, the death of Robert Nourrit in 1894 and that of Eugene in 1895, the workshop was abandoned in favor of the publishing business by the new management entrusted to Pierre Mainguet and his brother-in-law, Henri-Joseph Bourdel, the grandchildren of Henri.

Between 1900 and 1930, Plon, Nourrit et Cie opened to literature and essays, competing with Calmann-Lévy or Flammarion and the house is renamed Librairie Plon, the grandsons of Plon & Nourrit. In the catalog, we find best-selling authors such as Paul Bourget, Abel Hermant, Julien Green. The collection "Feux croisés" (Crossfire), directed by Gabriel Marcel, welcomed foreign authors like Graham Greene. In 1932, "Aventures", a hardback collection with an illustrated dust jacket sold for six francs with authors such as Maurice Renard, Jack London, Pierre Mac Orlan, was a mixed success but its format and presentation would flourish twenty years later.

Maurice Bourdel (1889–1968), who succeeded his father, edited Henri Massis and Robert Brasillach.

At World War II, the line was different as Plon welcomed Winston Churchill's memoirs before later becoming the official publisher of General de Gaulle, through Charles Orengo, an inspired editorial director. In 1953, Jean Malaurie was able to create the collection "Terre humaine" where Claude Lévi-Strauss was published.

The time of mergers approached. In 1958, Maurice Bourdel, the last descendant of the Plon-Nourrit family, opened the capital to the general manager of Tallandier, close to the PDG of Hachette: Hachette ensured the control of the Plon's fund for its collection "Le Livre de poche". Bourdel, the last member of the family, left the presidency of Plon in 1962 and put an end to one hundred and thirty years of family history, offering Thierry de Clermont-Tonnerre, who came from the Union financière de Paris, the possibility of undertaking economies of scale, at the expense of Hachette. Clermont-Tonnerre made it possible to associate Julliard with the capital and to launch the collection of pockets "10/18" through a new legal structure, the General Union of edition (UGE) which included Plon. In 1966, Sven Nielsen, founder of the Presses de la Cité had an important part in UGE and formed the core of what would become the "group of the Cité" between 1972 and 1996.

This group, after much financial negotiation, was bought by the General Electric Company (CGE) in 1988, which placed Olivier Orban at the head of Plon, which now belonged to a larger group called CEP Communication, which changed its name in 1997 to Havas Publications Édition (HPE).

In 2001, HPE was absorbed by Vivendi Universal. In 2002, the Vivendi group, led by Jean-Marie Messier, encountered serious financial problems and finally had to sell several publishing houses in 2004, including Plon, to Wendel Investissement, which combined them in a new structure, Editis. In 2008, the Editis group was sold to the Spanish Planeta Group.

At the end of 2018, fourteen years after separating from it, Vivendi again became the owner of Editis for 900 million euros.

At the end of 2021, the publishing house Plon decided not to publish an investigative book on the author and politician Éric Zemmour for fear of the reaction of Vincent Bolloré, owner of the publishing house and supporter of Zemmour.[5]

Book series

  • L’Abeille PLON
  • Bibliothèque PLON
  • Bibliothèque reliée PLON
  • Dictionnaire Amoureux
  • Documents et Mémoires
  • Feux Croisés
  • La Nouvelle Bibliothèque PLON
  • Romans
  • Terre Humaine
  • Tribune Libre

Notes

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References

  • Sorel, Patricia (2016). Plon : Le sens de l'histoire (1833-1962). Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes.

External links

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  1. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  2. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  3. ↑ Mollier, Jean-Yves (2011). "Plon." In: Pascal Fouché, Daniel Péchoin, Philippe Schuwer, eds. et al., Dictionnaire encyclopédique du livre, 3. Paris: Éd. du Cercle de la Librairie, p. 278.
  4. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  5. ↑ Perrotin, David (23 décembre 2021). "Pour ne pas froisser Bolloré, les éditions Plon renoncent à publier...," Mediapart.
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