Julian Messner, previously an executive with
Boni & Liveright, and his wife Kathryn founded the firm in 1933, opening an office on West 40th Street in
Manhattan, and planning to publish juvenile books along with a small offering of adult books. They published four books in their first year, including ''Senator Marlowe's Daughter'' by
Frances Parkinson Keyes. the company was sold by the end of the year to
Pocket Books. Pocket was then acquired by
Simon & Schuster in 1966, during the 1960s wave of consolidation in the publishing industry. "Julian Messner" continued as a children's imprint under Simon & Schuster (S&S). The imprint later fell under
Macmillan Library Reference (S&S had acquired Macmillan, Inc., in 1994, and
Pearson acquired the educational, professional, and reference businesses of S&S in 1998), and shut down six children's imprints including Julian Messner in 1999. In 1958, the company published a fictionalized biography of baseball player
Warren Spahn for young readers, which was full of incorrect information and even positive false claims (such as claiming that Spahn had won a
Bronze Star, which was untrue). Spahn prevailed in a lawsuit against Messner, which is a leading case in the concept of
false light, a claim related to
defamation. ==References==