ABSTRACT
The latter half of the twentieth century has been a traumatic time for printers. Printing technology has changed at a bewilderingly rapid rate as a result of the increasing automation of printing processes. On the publishing side, it had long been recognised that Taylor & Francis suffered from lack of an adequate outlet in North America. By the early 1980s, about a third of the company’s turnover derived from the United States and it was felt that this could be appreciably increased by appropriate local support. In 1982, the company made an offer for the International Publications Service, which, despite its name, was a fairly low-key distributor situated in New York. The participation of academics in the guidance of Taylor & Francis, along with its status as a private company, had always been seen as positioning it between the general run of commercial publishers, on the one hand, and academic societies, on the other.
