Odhams Press

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Odhams Press was a British publishing firm. Originally a newspaper group in the 1890s, it took the name Odham's Press Ltd. in 1920 when it merged with John Bull magazine. By 1937 it had founded the first colour weekly, Woman, for which it set up and operated a dedicated high-speed print works. The company also owned Ideal Home (founded 1920) and the well-known equestrian magazine Horse and Hound (acquired). Later Odhams expanded into book publishing (for example, Winston Churchill's Painting as a Pastime, and an edition of the complete works of William Shakespeare) and comics, including Wham! and Smash!. In the early 1960s it was acquired by the Mirror Group Newspapers, along with the George Newnes Company and Amalgamated Press; the three companies were merged to form International Publishing Corporation (IPC).

[edit] Sources

• Howard Cox and Simon Mowatt. "Technology and Industrial Change: The Shift from Production to Knowledge-Based Business in the Magazine Print Publishing Industry" (Research Papers in International Business no. 27). Paper presented to the 2001 Association of Business Historians Conference, 2001. Available online.