Bertelsmann

Bertelsmann is a German media company headquartered in Gütersloh in eastern Westphalia, where it began in 1835 as a small publisher of evangelical hymn books and devotional pamphlets under its founder Carl Bertelsmann, a bookbinder. The business stayed in the family through the Mohn line and grew slowly through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, adding historical, philological and fiction titles to its religious list and buying weaker competitors to modernize them. Its modern expansion followed the 1948 German currency reform, when Reinhard Mohn built the Lesering book club and introduced direct selling to German publishing. By the mid-1990s, as the cited company history reports, it was the largest media group in Germany and Europe, active in magazine, newspaper and book publishing, music, television, multimedia and printing, with most of its share capital held by the Bertelsmann Foundation.