Vivendi did an about-face on its decision to sell Houghton last week, as the company's board singled out the Boston publisher for an attempted sale. This comes less than three weeks after new Vivendi CEO Jean-Rene Fourtou told publishing unit head Agnes Touraine in an e-mail that Houghton was an essential part of the business and would not be sold (News, Aug. 5).

While in hindsight it's tempting to read the Fourtou e-mail as mere posturing, one insider said the turnaround may have been born of a genuine disagreement between Fourtou, who was open to keeping the company's hand in American educational publishing, and the board, which felt the division would be the easiest to sell.

Houghton is indeed a logical choice for the first divestiture—as one of the company's most recent investments, it is integrated only minimally. And the choice is less likely to prompt chatter among some investors, who know less about educational publishing than they do about, say, Hollywood.

Possible buyers are the big educational publishers, like Pearson and Reed Elsevier, despite regulatory issues that might make them gun-shy. Company officials said they hoped to recoup the $2.2 billion they paid for Houghton in the seller's market of June 2001. That may put a crimp in their hopes for a quick transaction—with the dearth of buyers available right now, fast cash and big cash might not exactly be synonymous. The trade unit, because of its size, could be easy to split off, but it wouldn't bring the cash injection that Vivendi clearly needs.

With all this going on, Houghton employees could be forgiven for feeling a little seasick. In the last 14 months they've endured speculation about the company's sale to Vivendi; the sale itself; the head of the trade unit exiting and a new head named; a CEO departed; a CEO named; the CEO at its parent company deposed and a CEO at its parent named; a private assurance that nothing would change; and a public notice that everything would.

Insiders said Houghton managers were surprised by the announcement, and even professionals sounded like they needed to work at painting a happy face on the news. "If you look at a lot of the successful publishers, most of them have been acquired at least once," spokesperson Collin Earnst said. Earnst said the company's only loss could be the demise of "some successful synergies that we had begun developing."