William Jovanovich, 81; Led Publishing Firm’s Growth

William Jovanovich, the unconventional publisher who turned a second-tier firm into one of the nation’s foremost textbook, medical and scientific publishing houses, has died. He was 81.

Jovanovich, the retired president and chief executive officer of Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, died of a heart attack at his home in San Diego on Tuesday after a long illness.

Jovanovich joined Harcourt Brace & Co. as a college textbook salesman in 1947. By 1954, he had risen to president. Over the next 36 years, he turned the tiny publishing house with $8 million in sales into a diversified company that had $1.3 billion in sales in 1990, when he resigned as chairman.

His resignation came after the company had amassed an overwhelming debt to fight off a hostile takeover attempt in the late 1980s--a debt that resulted in the sale of the company and the later breakup of its divisions.

As a publisher of elementary, secondary and college textbooks, Jovanovich was considered an innovator.

“Mr. Jovanovich was always ahead of his times,” said Rubin Pfeffer, chief creative officer at Pearson Education, an educational and testing company, who worked for Jovanovich for 16 years.

“He did things like bring color to textbooks when everyone else was publishing them in black and white,” said Pfeffer. “And it wasn’t just to bring color into the book; it was to bring color into the educational experience, to make it engaging.”

Pfeffer said Jovanovich also “invested in electronic publishing for classroom use really and truly years before the Internet and CD-ROM craze.”

Although it primarily published textbooks, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich published an impressive list of internationally known authors, including Mary McCarthy, Charles Lindbergh, Hannah Arendt, Milton Friedman, Georges Simenon, Alice Walker, Mark Helprin and Octavio Paz.

“I watched him work with his authors . . . [and] was always struck by the great sense of trust he established,” said Jovanovich’s son Peter, chairman and chief executive officer of Pearson Education. “They knew in the end that, as my father used to say, ‘You don’t publish books, you publish authors.’ ”

As a publisher, Pfeffer said, Jovanovich “marched to his own rhythm, and then that rhythm took root” elsewhere.

As an example, he said, Jovanovich established the now-industrywide concept of editorial imprints when he brought prominent European publishers Helen and Kurt Wolff to the United States in 1961. Under the Wolff imprint, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich published books by authors such as Umberto Eco, Gunter Grass and Anne Morrow Lindbergh.

In 1970, in recognition of Jovanovich’s contributions, his name was added to the company name.

“He was,” said Peter Jovanovich, “the quintessential American story.”

The son of immigrant parents--his mother was Polish, his father Montenegrin--Vladimir Jovanovich was born in a northern Colorado coal mining camp.

He grew up speaking Serbian and Polish and did not learn English until he began elementary school in Denver, where he became known as William and excelled in his studies. He won a four-year scholarship to the University of Colorado, followed by a two-year graduate fellowship to Harvard University in 1941.

World War II interrupted his studies in English and American literature at Harvard, and he joined the U.S. Navy as an officer in early 1942. After his discharge in 1946, he enrolled at Columbia University.

While he was working on a dissertation on Ralph Waldo Emerson, Jovanovich ran out of money and took a $50-a-week job as a textbook salesman at Harcourt Brace.

Two series of textbooks that he created in the early 1950s--”Adventures in Literature” and “Warriner’s English Composition and Grammar”--are still in print.

“One of the strongest lessons I learned from him is that to be a really good [textbook] publisher, you have to immerse yourself in what public schools do, understand their mission and how they work,” said Peter Jovanovich.

Under William Jovanovich’s leadership in the 1970s, the company experienced stunning growth and diversification: It acquired insurance firms and SeaWorld parks in San Diego, Orlando, Fla., and Aurora, Ohio. The company later added a fourth SeaWorld in San Antonio.

“It was an opportunity to build the company in a new direction,” Pfeffer said of the diversification. “Mr. Jovanovich saw SeaWorld as not necessarily being a theme park, but he saw it as an opportunity to create a family and educational experience. When SeaWorld was under Mr. Jovanovich, a lot of educational components were added to the entertainment, so one would learn about the animals and the sea life in an engaging way.”

In 1982, Jovanovich, believing that a national company needn’t be based in midtown Manhattan, stunned the East Coast publishing industry when he moved the publishing house’s headquarters from New York to Orlando, and its various divisions to San Diego, Cleveland, San Antonio and Dallas.

In 1987, the publicly held company was faced with an unwanted takeover by British publisher Robert Maxwell, whom Jovanovich reportedly despised. To thwart the effort, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich took on nearly $3 billion in debt.

Jovanovich, known for his eloquence as a speaker and for writing annual reports that were, Pfeffer said, “almost like reading a literary document,” wrote seven books, including four novels. He continued to write after retiring.

The company that he once led was sold in 1991 and was again sold more recently and broken into pieces, said Peter Jovanovich.

“My father obviously took it very hard,” he said. “But he got through it, and I think the best thing that happened to him in the last 10 years is he managed to stay as close as he did [with his family], especially to his grandchildren.”

In addition to Peter, Jovanovich is survived by his son Stefan of Orinda, Calif., daughter Martha Welsh of San Diego, and six grandchildren.

A funeral will be held at 11 a.m. Saturday at St. George’s Church, 2025 Denver St., San Diego.