HarperCollins Terminates ReganBooks

-- Library Journal, 1/22/2007

Roughly a month after sending bad girl publisher Judith Regan packing, parent HarperCollins last week swept away the last vestiges of her operation by disbanding the controversial ReganBooks imprint. Harper/Morrow president Michael Morrison said that the publishers felt its "authors will be best served by being integrated into HarperCollins." During its tenure, ReganBooks published several big buck yet flavor-of-the month celebrity titles, several of which seemed designed to shock. The pinnacle, however, was last November’s If I Did It, the failed O.J. Simpson book/TV special combo in which the accused murderer detailed how he would have butchered his wife if he’d indeed committed the crime. Both book and TV show were cancelled after the publisher came under attack from a disgusted public and the media. The Simpson fiasco was followed by the cancellation of sports writer Peter Golenbock’s 7: The Mickey Mantle Novel, a fictional biography that came under fire for portraying the Yankee legend as a drunken womanizer. Although HarperCollins claims the odious O.J. murder-book and Mantle debacles didn’t cause Regan’s demise, the incidents fit like a glove—baseball or otherwise.