I am indebted to the Pan Macmillan internal blog, The Digitalist, for this link to a site about the future of education. I'd recommend that you switch off the sound unless you're into meaningless electronic musical drivel but the graphics are terrific and the messages clear.

I'm off to a meeting right now but will later today add a spot of nostalgia.

And the nostalgia comes courtesy of Alysoun Sanders who runs the Macmillan Archive in Basingstoke. If you take the trouble to checck out the links you'll also be introduced to the riches of the old newsletters which are a treasure house for historians of publishing.

Macmillan’s involvement in India from pre-Independence days to the 1990s can be found in articles that appeared in Macmillan News, the company newsletter that ran for 30 years from 1961.

At the time of independence Macmillan had 3 branches in India based in Bombay, Madras and Calcutta. K R Clemens Manager of the Calcutta branch, worked in India during the three and a half decades that bridged the last years of British India “with its endeavours and its last vestiges of pomp and circumstance, and the first twenty years of the independent Republic of India” and succeeded C A Parkhouse who had been in India with Macmillan since 1913. Clemens saw changes, which were “great and far-reaching” calling for “constant adjustments”. On his retirement in 1968 he commended “the co-operative effort that has always existed” within the company. 

David Green who succeeded  Mr Stagg as Manager of the Madras (Chennai) branch also tells his story of post-independence publishing and the growth of local publishing and nationalisation of school textbooks and the opening of showrooms in Bangalore, Hyderabad, Coimbatore, Trichinopoly and Rivandrum. The “Stories to Remember” series that began in 1954 are still on the Macmillan Education list.

In January 1970 the newly formed public company, Macmillan Company of India Ltd with its headquarters in Chennai took over the role of the 3 branches and in 1972 the main offices were moved to Delhi.

By 1979 the process of indianisation was fully implemented and the company has continued to grow and to expand into areas that were never envisaged by Alexander Macmillan when he first embarked on plans to publish a series of books especially for India more than 140 years ago in the 1860s.