Philosophy
Earl Coleman
January 9th, 1916 to October 12th, 2009
"Earl Coleman, Publisher and Poet, Dies at 93"
by
William Grimes
November 14th, 2009
The New York Times
Earl M. Coleman was a fledgling short-story writer and poet fresh out of the Army when he got the idea for a custom translation business in 1946. At a poetry workshop he organized, he got to talking with two students, one a French teacher, the other a German engineer.
Why not translate scientific material into English? Mr. Coleman suggested.
With his wife at the time, Frances, he started Consultants Bureau, a custom translation service, and over the years built it into the Plenum Publishing Corporation, one of the world’s largest translators and publishers of scientific and technical material. Through Da Capo Press, founded in 1963, it developed a profitable line in reprinted books on music, art and architecture.
Mr. Coleman died of a pulmonary embolism on Oct. 12 at the age of 93, his second wife, Ellen Schneid Coleman, said. He lived in Somerset, N.J.
Mr. Coleman had started with a hundred dollars and a flash of intuition. Soon after setting up Consultants Bureau, he learned that the United States government was sitting on 21 tons of captured German scientific documents. He immediately offered to buy a ton of them, only to be told that the government did not work that way.
Instead, the Commerce Department sent out to American businesses a monthly bulletin describing selected documents in the German cache. Those interested could order a document and then translate it.
Mr. Coleman saw that companies were translating the same articles over and over — a pointless duplication of effort. “Obviously the problem was how to mass-produce translations of scientific material,” he told Publishers Weekly in 1975.
He then turned to the Soviet Union as a source of material. Other companies were already translating articles from Soviet scientific journals, but Mr. Coleman decided to publish journals in their entirety, starting in 1949 with The Journal of General Chemistry, U.S.S.R.
By 1956, his company was translating a dozen Soviet journals, using a stable of 50 translators. It was at this point that the British publishing tycoon Robert Maxwell, the owner of the science and medical publishers Pergamon Press, came calling with an offer to buy out Mr. Coleman for $50,000 in cash — “more money than I had ever seen in any one place in my life,” Mr. Coleman wrote in an article in Publishing Research Quarterly in 1994.
Mr. Coleman turned him down flat, whereupon Maxwell threatened to start his own Russian translation service. To drive home the point, he showed Mr. Coleman a list of the journals he intended to translate. It included all the titles offered by the Consultants Bureau.
Undeterred, Mr. Coleman did an end run around his adversary. He signed a royalty agreement with the Soviet government’s copyright agency, the first such large-scale agreement between a Western company and the Soviet Union and the foundation of Mr. Coleman’s success.
When Maxwell persisted, the Soviets, at Mr. Coleman’s instigation, told Maxwell that if he did not desist, the Soviet government would prohibit Soviet learned societies and scientists from having any dealings with his company.
The threat from Maxwell evaporated.
Earl Maxwell Coleman was born on Jan. 9, 1916, in the Bronx and attended New York University and City College. He was drafted into the Army in 1941 and re-enlisted, in the Army Air Corps, after World War II broke out. He trained airmen on flight simulators in the United States and in Britain. He also won a pot of money playing poker.
After the war, Mr. Coleman, intent on becoming a writer, managed to place a short story with Esquire but otherwise found that the literary life was depleting his gambling winnings. He spent the next 40 years as a publishing executive, writing fiction and poetry on the side.
There was a bit of poetry in his renaming of the company in 1965. He called it Plenum “for full, rich, plentiful,” Mr. Coleman told Publishers Weekly. “It was either that or Nova, which I discovered was a bright star that burned out, so that wasn’t for me.”
By that time, it was a large and growing presence in scientific and technical publishing, where the profit margins on books like “Electron Spin Relaxation in Liquids” could be huge. When Mr. Coleman sold his rights to Plenum in 1977, it published 92 Russian journals in translation, nearly 75 English-language journals, and 225 scientific titles.
Mr. Coleman’s marriage to Frances Allan ended in divorce in 1965. In addition to his second wife, he is survived by his sons, Allan Douglass Coleman, of Staten Island, and Dennis Scott Coleman, of Rockville, Md.; a sister, Lucille Bandes, of Manhasset, N.Y.; and four grandchildren.
After retiring from Plenum in 1977, Mr. Coleman started a new publishing venture, Earl M. Coleman Enterprises, with his second wife as editor in chief. In 1984 he became president and publisher of National Publishers of the Black Hills, provider of educational books and electronic training materials, which he sold to Prentice Hall in 1988.
Plenum was bought for $258 million by the Dutch publishing company Wolters Kluwer in 1998. In 1999, the Perseus Books Group acquired Da Capo Press. Since 2004 it has been part of Springer.
Through the years Mr. Coleman continued to write poetry and fiction. In 2001, through Mellen Poetry Press, he finally published his first book of poems, titled “A Stubborn Pine in a Stiff Wind.”
- A Step In The Right Direction...journal Access
This is good news though it may not mean much to the lay person, but it is a start to loosen the reigns of the mogul repository journals and may spill over to more science and non-science journals. Just this morning I tried to access a journal article...
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- Dust In Phoenix, Arizona...giant Cloud Waves In Iowa
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- Bessie Coleman...first African American Female Pilot
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Philosophy
Deceased--Earl Coleman
Earl ColemanJanuary 9th, 1916 to October 12th, 2009
"Earl Coleman, Publisher and Poet, Dies at 93"
by
William Grimes
November 14th, 2009
The New York Times
Earl M. Coleman was a fledgling short-story writer and poet fresh out of the Army when he got the idea for a custom translation business in 1946. At a poetry workshop he organized, he got to talking with two students, one a French teacher, the other a German engineer.
Why not translate scientific material into English? Mr. Coleman suggested.
With his wife at the time, Frances, he started Consultants Bureau, a custom translation service, and over the years built it into the Plenum Publishing Corporation, one of the world’s largest translators and publishers of scientific and technical material. Through Da Capo Press, founded in 1963, it developed a profitable line in reprinted books on music, art and architecture.
Mr. Coleman died of a pulmonary embolism on Oct. 12 at the age of 93, his second wife, Ellen Schneid Coleman, said. He lived in Somerset, N.J.
Mr. Coleman had started with a hundred dollars and a flash of intuition. Soon after setting up Consultants Bureau, he learned that the United States government was sitting on 21 tons of captured German scientific documents. He immediately offered to buy a ton of them, only to be told that the government did not work that way.
Instead, the Commerce Department sent out to American businesses a monthly bulletin describing selected documents in the German cache. Those interested could order a document and then translate it.
Mr. Coleman saw that companies were translating the same articles over and over — a pointless duplication of effort. “Obviously the problem was how to mass-produce translations of scientific material,” he told Publishers Weekly in 1975.
He then turned to the Soviet Union as a source of material. Other companies were already translating articles from Soviet scientific journals, but Mr. Coleman decided to publish journals in their entirety, starting in 1949 with The Journal of General Chemistry, U.S.S.R.
By 1956, his company was translating a dozen Soviet journals, using a stable of 50 translators. It was at this point that the British publishing tycoon Robert Maxwell, the owner of the science and medical publishers Pergamon Press, came calling with an offer to buy out Mr. Coleman for $50,000 in cash — “more money than I had ever seen in any one place in my life,” Mr. Coleman wrote in an article in Publishing Research Quarterly in 1994.
Mr. Coleman turned him down flat, whereupon Maxwell threatened to start his own Russian translation service. To drive home the point, he showed Mr. Coleman a list of the journals he intended to translate. It included all the titles offered by the Consultants Bureau.
Undeterred, Mr. Coleman did an end run around his adversary. He signed a royalty agreement with the Soviet government’s copyright agency, the first such large-scale agreement between a Western company and the Soviet Union and the foundation of Mr. Coleman’s success.
When Maxwell persisted, the Soviets, at Mr. Coleman’s instigation, told Maxwell that if he did not desist, the Soviet government would prohibit Soviet learned societies and scientists from having any dealings with his company.
The threat from Maxwell evaporated.
Earl Maxwell Coleman was born on Jan. 9, 1916, in the Bronx and attended New York University and City College. He was drafted into the Army in 1941 and re-enlisted, in the Army Air Corps, after World War II broke out. He trained airmen on flight simulators in the United States and in Britain. He also won a pot of money playing poker.
After the war, Mr. Coleman, intent on becoming a writer, managed to place a short story with Esquire but otherwise found that the literary life was depleting his gambling winnings. He spent the next 40 years as a publishing executive, writing fiction and poetry on the side.
There was a bit of poetry in his renaming of the company in 1965. He called it Plenum “for full, rich, plentiful,” Mr. Coleman told Publishers Weekly. “It was either that or Nova, which I discovered was a bright star that burned out, so that wasn’t for me.”
By that time, it was a large and growing presence in scientific and technical publishing, where the profit margins on books like “Electron Spin Relaxation in Liquids” could be huge. When Mr. Coleman sold his rights to Plenum in 1977, it published 92 Russian journals in translation, nearly 75 English-language journals, and 225 scientific titles.
Mr. Coleman’s marriage to Frances Allan ended in divorce in 1965. In addition to his second wife, he is survived by his sons, Allan Douglass Coleman, of Staten Island, and Dennis Scott Coleman, of Rockville, Md.; a sister, Lucille Bandes, of Manhasset, N.Y.; and four grandchildren.
After retiring from Plenum in 1977, Mr. Coleman started a new publishing venture, Earl M. Coleman Enterprises, with his second wife as editor in chief. In 1984 he became president and publisher of National Publishers of the Black Hills, provider of educational books and electronic training materials, which he sold to Prentice Hall in 1988.
Plenum was bought for $258 million by the Dutch publishing company Wolters Kluwer in 1998. In 1999, the Perseus Books Group acquired Da Capo Press. Since 2004 it has been part of Springer.
Through the years Mr. Coleman continued to write poetry and fiction. In 2001, through Mellen Poetry Press, he finally published his first book of poems, titled “A Stubborn Pine in a Stiff Wind.”
- A Step In The Right Direction...journal Access
This is good news though it may not mean much to the lay person, but it is a start to loosen the reigns of the mogul repository journals and may spill over to more science and non-science journals. Just this morning I tried to access a journal article...
- Strange Clouds
Shelf cloud, Minnesota, US. When seen from the ground shelf clouds appear as low, wedge-shaped clouds and are usually associated with severe thunderstorms. South Dakota, US: Mammatus clouds over South Dakota. Mammatus is a meteorological term...
- Deceased--janice Voss
Janice VossOctober 8th, 1956 to February 6th, 2012"Janice Voss, Shuttle Astronaut and Scientist, Dies at 55"byDennis HevesiFebruary 9th, 2012The New York TimesJanice Voss, a space shuttle astronaut and scientist who explored the behavior of fire in weightlessness,...
- Dust In Phoenix, Arizona...giant Cloud Waves In Iowa
This was the dust storm that ate Phoenix, Arizona. Sounds like an Arch Obler radio play. The rapidity is astounding. But check this out... "Giant Atmospheric Waves Over Iowa" October 11th, 2007 NASA Those giant waves—"undular bore waves"—were...
- Bessie Coleman...first African American Female Pilot
"Bessie Coleman Should Be Celebrated" by Alfred Oshin March 26th, 2010 Ohmynews The month in which International Woman’s Day is held draws to a close. I think March should end as it began, by celebrating the achievements of women. Many names, in...