The Bookseller.com

1st December 2008

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Schalit quits La Martinière

26.08.08 Barbara Casassus

The deputy managing director of La Martinière publishing group Emmanuel Schalit will quit on 29th August, the company said in a statement. No announcement has been made about his future plans. A new deputy managing director will not be appointed, but group chairman and c.e.o. Hervé de La Martinière will assume two of his jobs.

Schalit, a graduate of the prestigious French Ecole Polytechnique and the Harvard Business School executive education programme, was also head of La Martinière's Volumen distribution subsidiary and head of Loglibris, a distribution subsidiary set up in partnership with Bertelsmann's French offshoot Direct Group France earlier this year. Group chairman and c.e.o. Hervé de La Martinière will take over the top jobs at Volumen, which was created after the group bought the Seuil publishing house at the beginnning of 2004, and at Loglibris.

The La Martinière group was founded in 1992 and specialises in illustrated photographic, heritage, art and leisure books. It has had a stormy past. With the acquisition of Seuil four years ago, it become the third largest French publisher following Hachette and Editis. But booksellers were worried that the takeover would prompt a change of policy and anonymous letters suggested that employee-shareholders felt they had not received their share of the spoils.

Volumen had a rough start too. Delivery delays in late 2004 were so serious that several outside publishers, including Minuit and Liana Levi, took the group to court to demand compensation for the prejudice they had suffered.

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