William Jovanovich, longtime chairman of Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, died at his home in San Diego December 4. He was 81.
After serving in the navy during World War II, Jovanovich joined the publishing industry, starting out at Doubleday. He joined Harcourt Brace in 1947 as a college traveler, later working as a textbook editor. After being appointed president of Harcourt Brace in 1954 at the age of 34, Jovanovich went on to transform the firm from a house with $8 million in annual sales to one of the largest publishers in the world, with more than a billion dollars in annual sales by 1990. Under his leadership, HBJ became one of the first houses to launch small publishing imprints, as it did in 1961 with Helen and Kurt Wolff, something that is a standard feature today among the larger houses. Through his support for the COPE program in the 1970s, he was an early advocate for attracting minorities to book publishing. Still, as a visionary figure in book publishing, Jovanovich had his share of eccentric and failed ideas. He spent hundreds of millions of dollars getting HBJ into marine theme parks; blaming the high cost of doing business in Manhattan, he effectively moved HBJ out of New York in the mid-1980s, relocating in San Diego and Florida. And he twice attempted to get the industry to embrace selling books on a nonreturnable basis, but found no takers. Jovanovich retired in 1990, three years after successfully blocking a takeover by Robert Maxwell, although the fight left HBJ deeply in debt.
