Time Life
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Publishing company

Not to be confused with Time Warner.

This article is about the company. For the album by the Charlie Haden Liberation Music Orchestra, see Time/Life.

Time Life (also habitually represented with a hyphen as Time-Life) is an American company formerly known for its production company and direct marketer conglomerate known for selling books, music, video/DVD, and other multimedia products. The current focus of the group is music, video, and entertainment experiences (such as the StarVista cruises) as the Time Life book division closed in 2001. Its products have been sold throughout North America, Europe, Australia, and Asia through television, print, retail, the Internet, telemarketing, and direct sales. Current operations are focused in the US and Canada with limited retail distribution overseas.

Overview

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Time Life was founded in 1961 as the book marketing division of the New York City-based Time Inc., with its headquarters located in Chicago, USA at that time.[1] It took its name from Time Inc.'s magazines, Time and Life, but remained independent from both, even though the company could in the beginning draw on the editorial services of both for their early 1960s book series, particularly were pictorial content was concerned. Starting in 1967, Time Life combined its book offerings with music collections (two to five records) and packaged them as a sturdy box set. After Walter Wanger's death in 1968, its Time Life Films subsidiary also acquired his production company Walter Wanger Productions and many of its films. When record labels were no longer producing vinyl albums in 1990, Time Life transitioned to CD. In the mid-1990s, Time Life acquired Heartland Music, with the Heartland Music label then appearing as a brand. This company was subsequently sold off and is no longer associated with Time Life.

On December 31, 2003, Time Life was sold by Time Warner to a group of private investors including Ripplewood Holdings L.L.C. and ZelnickMedia for an undisclosed price, becoming part of a holding company named Direct Holdings Worldwide L.L.C.[2][3] With that transaction, Direct Holdings US Corp became the legal name of Time Life which was kept as a brand name however, though the copyright disclaimer had it emphatically stated that it is "not affiliated with Time Warner Inc. or Time Inc.," which owns the Time and Life magazines, and from which the company name originated from in the first place. Direct Holdngs sells music and video products under the Time Life brand. In March 2007, Ripplewood led a group that took the Reader's Digest Association (RDA) private and made Time Life a division of RDA.[4]

In addition to the company's film and music core activities, it was also the holding company of television and radio combo stations. Stations the company owned were KLZ-TV-AM-FM in Denver, WFBM-TV-AM-FM in Indianapolis, WOOD-TV-AM in Grand Rapids, Michigan, KERO-TV in Bakersfield, California, and KOGO-TV-AM-FM in San Diego, many of which were sold to McGraw-Hill in 1972; however, Time Life kept WOOD-TV, which became WOTV after the sale of the other stations, and remained owned by the company until 1984. It was also the U.S. television distributor of programmes from the BBC in the United Kingdom until Lionheart Television took over in 1982. Time Life was based in the Time Life building in Rockefeller Center.

In 2013 Reader's Digest Association sold Time Life to Mosaic Media Investment Partners.[5]

In 2023, Time Life and its only official online retailer was shut down, followed by the closing of Direct Holdings in early 2024.

Book series

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As Time Life Books, Inc., the company gained fame as a seller of book series that would be mailed to households in monthly installments, operating as book sales clubs, and known as the direct-to-consumer business model. Starting out for real with their 1962-67 LIFE World Library (the "Time" qualifier was only in 1966 added to the company's book logos) series after the tentative Time Capsule book series publishing trial run in 1960-61, original publisher Jerome Hardy declared early on that the publisher would succeed through a strategy to "give the customer more than he has any right to expect."[6] Several of these book series garnered substantial critical acclaim unusual for a mass-market mail order house. On the first volume in the 1966-70 Library of Art series for example, American artist Rockwell Kent commented, "It would be hard for me to overstate my delight in "The World of Michelangelo" – not merely for its superb reproductions of the master’s work but for the textual and pictorial presentation."[7] Other examples standing out for their perceived picture/text quality included the 1970s Library of Photography series which featured for its time very high-quality duotone printing for its black-and-white reproductions in its original edition, having been able to draw on Life's own vast archive of journalistic and art photographs from virtually every major contemporary photographer.[8] In similar vein, the 1968-77 Foods Of The World series featured contributions by renowned contemporary food writers/critics and chefs such as M. F. K. Fisher, James Beard, Julia Child, Craig Claiborne, among others. The 1978-80 The Good Cook series, edited by Richard Olney, featured likewise contributions from Jeremiah Tower, fe Grigson, Michel Lemonnier, and many others.

Other well regarded series covered nature, urban geography, the sciences, and [world civilizations] histories, as well as an early series on contemporary life in various countries of the world. Content of all of these earlier series was somewhat academic in tone and presentation, providing the basics of the subjects in the way it might be done in a lecture aimed at the general public. One of the earliest such series concerned the 1965-68 Great Ages of Man history series, which was critically acclaimed by the Los Angeles Times where it was stated in a 1966 editorial that the series "(…)demonstrates the imposing possibilities of pictorial history… This, of course, is to be expected from the TIME-LIFE specialists. What is even more important is the selection of scholars of the reputation of Bowra and Hadas for texts. Research is meticulous and relevant. This is history written with respect for the reader’s intelligence, and, therefore, more worthy of praise".[7] The same held equally true for the slightly earlier 1963-64 The LIFE History of the United States series where each of the volumes was written by an American historian of contemporary renown.[9] Because of their intrinsic transient nature in regard to validity, most science book series quickly became ephemera of their time only a short while later on, especially those concerning fields in which developments followed each other at breakneck speed, such as the ones covered in the late-1980s Understanding Computers and Voyage Through the Universe series which were already outdated before either series had even completed its run. Nor were their history series entirely exempt of this phenomenon either, especially the early 1960s ones, as new insights, archeological findings and new technology have the potential to completely rewrite history as understood in past decades. Mayan history for example, was featured in Time Life's early Great Ages of Man and The Emergence of Man series. However, historians were forced to largely rewrite Mayan history after their script had been fully unlocked and modern technology had revolutionized archeology in the 21st century, making the Time Life book entries on the subject obsolete and outdated. This even holds true for their 1993 "The Magnificent Maya" outing (ISBN 0809498790) in their more recent Lost Civilizations series.

Some other series are much less highly regarded, especially the later output as the publisher moved away from soberly presented science and history toward sensationalism (that then with new age overtones imbued trend started in the mid-1980s with the The Enchanted World and Mysteries of the Unknown series,[10] followed in the early 1990s by the Library of Curious and Unusual Facts and True Crime series as prime sensationalist examples), less academically but more popularized written history (such as the Time Frame aka History of the World and Lost Civilizations series), and DIY-themed books. The books though, regardless of their perceived quality, are easy to find at low prices on the used-book market, due to their being published in millions of copies. The same incidentally, also applied for the handful of stand-alone book titles the company had published which were not part of a series, but which were nonetheless usually conceived along the same thematic and format execution lines as the main book series had been.

Yet, of some series it is known that a particular series title enjoyed a much smaller print run than the other volumes in the series, resulting in the after-market value of that particular volume and/or the set as a whole increasing initially – though waning interest in Time Life books has caused these prices to decrease again after the turn of the millenium. Examples include the fourteen-volume "40th Anniversary Edition" The Civil War: A Narrative and the eighteen-volume Voices of the Civil War series, where the volumes "Petersburg Siege to Bentonville" (ISBN 0783501129) and "Shenandoah 1864" (ISBN 078354717X) were the rarer ones respectively. The same applied for "The Rise of Cities" volume (ISBN 0705409910) from the twenty five-volume History of the World series, the English-language European variant of the home market Time Frame series.

Non-USA-specific topic series were habitually translated into other languages (French being the most predominant, due to Time Life's desire to have to bordering French-Canada served as well), and disseminated through local branches of Time-Life Books in the intended target markets. For some, usually smaller language areas, Time Life resorted sometimes to licensing out their publications to local publishers, as was for example the case with The Old West and The Enchanted World series. However, not rarely were these translated versions truncated for various reasons. The Dutch language versions – disseminated through "Time-Life International BV" (later renamed to "Time-Life Books BV"), the in 1976 established regional subsidiary branch for mainland Europe and the British isles, at the time located at Ottho Heldringstraat 5, 1066 AZ Amsterdam, Netherlands, maintaining administrative offices in Paris (France), London (UK), and Munich (Germany)[11] – of History of the World (as "Time Life Wereld Geschiedenis"), The Epic of Flight (as "De Geschiedenis van de Luchtvaart") and The Enchanted World (as "Het Rijk der Fabelen"), for example, were shy of four, seven, and eight volumes in translation respectively, whereas the German-language version of The Old West (as "Der Wilde Westen," and, even though American specific, translated nonetheless due to the continued and unabated popularity of the Western genre in Germany), disseminated through the Amsterdam branch as Time-Life Bücher, was shy of seven volumes just like the French-language Le Far West edition was.

Of at least one book series is known that it was initiated by a local branch and not by the American mother company; the 1986–89 book series Australians at War was initiated by Time-Life Books Australia for that country, and therefore relatively rare on American soil.

Time Life no longer publishes books as its Time Life Books, Inc. book division was closed in January 2001.[6] One of its foreign subsidiaries though, the Amsterdam "Time Life Books BV" branch, kept open its doors a few year longer before it too was closed down around 2005.[12] Time Inc./Time Warner, however, continues to publish similar material through Time Home Entertainment Inc., (founded in the early 1990s)[13] but as (oftentimes retail) single volume titles, instead of (direct marketed) book series.

Proprietary published book series

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note: most of the information on the book series can be ascertained through M. Legg's and M.L. Martin's websites, listed below

Licensed published book series

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While the vast majority of published book series were conceived, initiated and produced by Time Life itself, which included the Australian branch initiated Australian at War series, the company also (re)issued on occasion series in similar vein as licensee under its own imprint that were originally conceived, produced and/or released by publishers elsewhere, typically for release on the US home market, though series with a British Commonwealth pedigree were released through the regional, Time-Life Books BV, Amsterdam subsidiary as mentioned in the colophons of the individual books. Aside from the translations, the English-language versions of the Commonwealth-derived series were published by a variety of publishers for the different English-speaking territories outside the UK, with Time Life as the British Isles designated one. These Time Life versions are far less common, if not outright rare, in used-book markets than Time Life's own proprietary releases, the North-American ones in particular.

[Cultural] Atlas of..., An Equinox Book aka World Atlas of Civilisation (1991-1996, 19 volumes); series licensed from Andromeda Oxford Ltd, Oxfordshire, England whose authors were scholars affiliated with Oxford University Press, the publication arm of the eponymous university. This British series was conceived in the second half of the 1980s and dealt with the history and culture of territories and civilizations, predominantly related in maps. It was in Time Life's 1992 promo mails that the series was solicited as the World Atlas of Civilisation (notice British spelling) series.

A Child's First Library of Learning; series of educational books based on a Japanese series published by Gakken

A Child's First Library of Values; series of storybooks based on a Japanese series also published by Gakken

The Civil War: A Narrative – 40th Anniversary Edition by Shelby Foote (1999-2000, 14 volumes); originally a US 1958-1974 three-volume release from Random House

The Illustrated Library of the Earth (1993-1996, 6 volumes, also translated and released in Dutch by Time Life Books BV); licensed from Weldon Owen Pty Ltd, Australia – essentially a deluxe and updated, or addendum version of the Planet Earth Series

MHQ, The Quarterly Journal of Military History (1988-); launched in the autumn of 1988 the self explanatory publication was technically a magazine series, but was initially executed as a series of deluxe hardcover quarterlies, in format execution reminiscent of the Time Life publications and primarily intended for the American home market. Four years later,[23] original publisher MHQ, Inc. therefore sought out the services of Time Life Books, Inc. for the various back office activities in order to broaden the potential customer reach of the fledgling magazine, specifically where marketing (the promotional solicitation mailings in particular), subscription and distribution services were concerned, making the company essentially a co-publisher. After Time Life Books, Inc. had gone defunct, the publication went it alone again under new ownership and eventually transitioned into an actual magazine format, and was as of 2024 still being published.[24]

System Earth[, An Equinox Book] (1990-1991, 4 volumes); a geography in the broadest sense series. Even though Time Life Books BV became the first time publisher of the volumes released, neither series concept nor contents were conceived by them, but rather by the already mentioned Oxford University Press, drawing upon their author pool of affiliated academics. Time Life was merely a commissioned publisher charged with the production and associated services of the book series. In a way this and the subsequent World Atlas of Civilisation series became the (European branch) publisher's attempt to return to the more scholarly approach for their series they had started out with and were renowned for from the 1960s until the mid-1980s. In their 1991 promo mailing Time Life solicited at least five more series titles beyond the four that were actually released in the end, and then in Europe only.

Understanding Science and Nature; based on a Japanese series of books by Gakken

The Vietnam Experience (1981–88, 25 volumes); while an original home market publication by Boston Publishing Company,[25] Time Life Books, Inc. served as a de facto co-publisher as it took on subscription, distribution, and promotional services through mailings and television ads – several of which currently posted on YouTube.

Williams Sonoma Cooking series; licensed from Weldon Owen Pty Ltd, Australia

Time Life Music

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Time Life added music in 1967, selling box sets and collections through Time–Life Records as a division subordinated under Time Life Books, Inc.[1] The division changed its name to Time Life Music after music cassette tapes were added to its array of releases, with its European iterations, including the German Time Life Musik label, subordinated under the Amsterdam "Time Life Books BV" subsidiary branch.[26] During the 1960s and 1970s, the collections released by Time–Life Records catered to an adult audience, with genres including classical, jazz, swing and orchestral music; and the music of operas and Broadway theatre. On occasion, Time Life offered popular music (generally pre-1955 music, as opposed to pop and rock music airing on contemporary hit radio stations in the United States at the time) in box-sets. Although there were television advertisements, Time Life advertised most of these sets in magazines, specialty catalogs and direct mail, just like it did with their book series.

In the early 1980s, Time Life began branching out, offering a series of albums focusing on country music. The first series was 1981's "Country Music," with volumes focusing on a particular artist and featuring eight or nine tracks per album. Twenty volumes were issued, with many of country's greatest artists of the time (Charley Pride was the first artist featured) getting their own album. But until the mid-1980s, Time–Life did not feature a rock music-intensive series for customers, preferring to cater to older adults with conservative music tastes.

Pop music enters the picture

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Time Life's first successful foray into rock music came in 1986, with a series called "The Rock 'n' Roll Era." Each volume in that series—like similar series that followed—focused on a particular year (in this case, 1955 through 1964—the early, pre-Beatles years of rock music), a stylistic trend or particular artist influential in rock music. Each volume had 22 tracks, and was said to contain the original hit recording by the original artist (although this wasn't always true on early pressings of the early albums in the series). The songs themselves represented the most important and popular songs from the period or subject featured. An essay published by Both Sides Now Publications noted that Time-Life's move into rock music came at a time when much of the adult audience Time-Life catered to grew up during the rock-and-roll era and, as such, the new series was consistent with its goal of catering to an adult audience.[1]

"The Rock 'n' Roll Era" series was a big success, and by the time the final volume was issued in the early 1990s, more than 50 different volumes (including two Christmas albums) had been released. This paved the way for more country and pop music-intensive series, including "Country USA," "Classic Rock," "Sounds of the Seventies," "Sounds of the Eighties," "Your Hit Parade" (a series featuring popular music of the 1940s through early 1960s) and "Super Hits." Like the earlier series, each volume issued had its own paperback booklet containing liner notes and information about the songs, with the addition of placement on various Billboard magazine charts.

Like the earlier box-sets featuring other musical styles and genres, the country and pop music series were advertised in magazines, catalogs and direct mail. By this time, some of these collections were advertised on television: either commercials or 30-minute infomercials. The television advertisements used slogans (e.g., "Relive your high school days ..."), clips of songs included in each volume (along with a scrolling list of other titles), a commercial spokesman (usually a performer or legendary disc jockey relevant to a given series, such as Rick Dees for a 1970s-intensive collection and Ralph Emery for a country music series) and testimonials from customers attesting to the quality and value of the albums, to pitch a given series. Key selling points of these collections are that each track was digitally transferred to the desired format using the original master recordings, as opposed to being "re-records"; and that the most popular and requested songs by customers could be found in a single collection (as opposed to a customer having to purchase many albums to obtain just a few desired tracks).

Customers were given a choice of which format they wanted their box set: either vinyl albums (through 1990), 8-track or cassette tape, or compact disc; today's box sets are offered only as compact discs.

While most of Time Life's box-sets and releases were critically hailed, there were also some minor faults pointed out by critics. For instance, several early pressings of the early volumes in "The Rock'n'Roll Era" series contained stereo re-recordings of the original hits (something that would be corrected on later pressings, either with the correct original recording or a replacement track). Sometimes, the most popular songs of a given time period were omitted, frequently due to licensing issues. Examples included The Beatles and The Rolling Stones for the Classic Rock and "Super Hits"/"AM Gold" series;, Garth Brooks and Shania Twain on various country music series;, and Prince, Madonna, Whitney Houston, Guns N' Roses, Bon Jovi, Janet Jackson and Michael Jackson on the main Sounds of the Eighties series.

Through 2010, several different series Time Life had offered were available on a subscription basis, either by calling a 1-800 number or sending a completed postcard-sized card and payment to Time–Life. Purportedly, the customer would get a specific volume (as advertised on TV or in a magazine) first, before receiving a new volume roughly every other month (on the format of their choice); customers and had the option of keeping just the volumes they wanted. In time, each volume was also offered for individual sale.

Several of the series – especially the pop, rock, country and rhythm and blues series – had retail versions for sale, released after the entire series was issued. Typically, these were sold at discount stores, often grouped in three-CD sets of 12 tracks each and having the most popular of the series' tracks, and cover artwork and naming loosely based on the subscription/catalog-exclusive titles. Additionally, the "Classic Country" series had special 15-track single-CD versions of several of its volumes issued for retail sale (in addition to budget 3-CD sets).

As of March 2023, Time Life began shutting down its direct-to-home CD and DVD music service. The company's website now only lists a toll-free number for assistance and the Time-Life infomercial channel has been pulled from all cable services.

Saguaro Road Records

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In 2008, Time Life launched Saguaro Roads Records as an in-house music recording label.

Under this label, albums have been released with Adam Hood, Blind Boys of Alabama, Bo Bice, Brandy and Ray J, Collin Raye, Dion, Edwin McCain, Hank Williams (estate), Jim Brickman, Joan Osborne, Lonestar, Marc Cohn, Mark Chesnutt, Patty Loveless, Rebecca Lynn Howard, Tanya Tucker, The Grascals, Angie Stone, Waylon Jennings and Don McLean.

Since its launch Saguaro Roads Records has had seven Grammy nominations. Notable releases include Patty Loveless's Mountain Soul II which won a Grammy Award for Best Bluegrass Album in 2010, Hank Williams: The Complete Mother's Best Recordings which was nominated for a Grammy in the Best Historical Album category in 2010, Joan Osborne's Bring it on Home which was nominated for Best Blues Album in 2012, The Beatles' "F1rst Recordings: 50th Anniversary Edition" which was nominated for Best Album Notes in 2012, and The Blind Boys of Alabama's Down in New Orleans which won a grammy for Best Traditional Gospel Album.[citation needed]

List of series

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The following list shows many of the collections the company has released, but is by no means exhaustive.

Time Life Video

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Time Life's video business has been growing quickly since 2000. Starting out at the dawn of the VHS-era in 1978,[29] the division went on to (re-)issue such documentaries as The World at War (1973-74), The Civil War (1990), The Wild West (1993), and Growing Up Wild (2012), though the company has more recently branched into nostalgic television shows as well. Time Life is able to leverage their music industry knowledge and contacts to release television shows previously held back because of expensive music rights clearances. Their collections are known for having extensive bonus features, liner notes and packaging. Television show releases from Time Life include:[30]

See also

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List of record labels

Columbia House

References

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