Time Life


Time Life, Inc. was an American multi-media conglomerate company formerly known as a prolific production/publishing company and direct marketeer seller of books, music, video/DVD, and other multimedia products. After all home market book publication activities had been shuttered in 2003, the focus of the group shifted exclusively towards music, video, and entertainment experiences such as the StarVista cruises. Its products have once been sold worldwide throughout the Americas, Europe, Australasia, and Asia via television, print, retail, the Internet, telemarketing, and direct sales. Activities were largely restricted to the North American home market afterwards, and operations were until recently focused on the US and Canada alone with very limited retail distribution overseas, ceasing altogether in 2023.

Overview

Time-Life, Inc. was founded in 1961 as the book marketing subsidiary of the New York City-based Time Inc., the later, around 1966, coined Time & Life, Inc. and took its name from Time Inc.'s two then-flagship magazines, Time and Life. It remained independent from both however, even though the company could in the beginning draw on the editorial services of both for their early 1960s book series, particularly where pictorial content was concerned. The subsidiary moved out of the New York City premises to its own headquarters in Chicago, USA after that building had finished construction in 1969, before it relocated back east again to 8280 Willow Oaks Corporate Drive, Fairfax, VA 22031 in 1986 where it remained until its ultimate demise in 2023.
Starting in 1967, Time-Life combined its book offerings with music collections and packaged them as a sturdy box set. 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.
In addition to the company's book and music core activities, it was also became the holding company of television and radio combo stations. Six initially individual stations were already acquired in the 1950s by mother company Time, Inc before the establishment of subsidiary Time-Life, Inc. in 1961, after which the into three consolidated combo stations became subordinated under the new subsidiary as Time–Life Broadcasting, Inc. Established in 1962, it was actually the first subsidiary Time-Life, Inc had formally split-off, even before the core book business activities themselves were two years later. Stations Time-Life eventually 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.
After Walter Wanger's death in 1968, its Time-Life Films subsidiary also bought his production company Walter Wanger Productions and many of its films. As Time-Life Film/Television, the company was right from the start also the U.S. television distributor of BBC programs as produced in the United Kingdom, until Lionheart Television took over that role in 1981.
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, who subordinated their acquisition under their jointly owned, Direct Holdings Global L.L.C. holding company, founded in 1998. 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.," the former owners of the Time and Life magazines, and from which the company name originated from in the first place. At the time of the takeover, it was reported the Time-Life, Inc.'s turnover had contracted to US$350 million, turning a 2001 US$20 million net operating profit into a net operating loss of US$50 million in 2003. Direct Holdings sold music and video products under the Time Life brand, and was also the holding company of the StarVista LIVE L.L.C. experience entertainment property, thereby becoming responsible for Time-Life's entry into that industry in the 2003-13 time period. In March 2007, Ripplewood led a group that acquired and privatized the Reader's Digest Association in the process agreeing to make Direct Holdings, and thus Time-Life, a subsidiary of RDA.
After having already filed for bankruptcy in 2009 for the first time, RDA sold Time-Life, Inc. to Mosaic Media Investment Partners in 2013 in order to settle outstanding financial obligations resulting from their subsequent 2012 bankruptcy. In 2023 and without so much as a whisper in contemporary media, Time-Life ended its six decades-long existence eventually, when the company and its only official online retailer were permanently shut down by its last owner, though the one remaining official website only went dark in May 2024.
Time-Life, Inc.'s progenitor company Time & Life, Inc. had remained throughout its entire existence headquartered in New York City. Its 1271 Avenue of the Americas location became Time-Life's nascent headquarters as well in the first years of its existence after Time & Life had shortly before relocated from its previous premises in Rockefeller Center in 1960. In 2014 it relocated again to smaller premises elsewhere in the city. As a brand, Time-Life actually outlived its sire by five years, as the remnants of Time & Life went defunct in early 2018 after a steady three-decades long decline, with its handful of surviving assets being broken up and sold piecemeal to a variety of third-party outsiders.

Time-Life Books

As Time-Life Books, Inc. - which was not formally incorporated as an official subsidiary until 1964 - the company gained fame as a seller of book series that were directly mailed to households in monthly installments, operating as book sales clubs, which was known as the direct-to-consumer business model. From its very launch in 1961 it was a runaway success with sales already expected to reach US$100 million one year into its existence.
Prior to the division's establishment, Time, Inc. had already dabbled with single-title book publications on an occasional, ad-hoc basis such as the 1957 "Three Hundred Years of American Painting" or 1961 "Great Battles of the Civil War" book titles as spin-offs of their two flagship magazines. It was Time, Inc. itself however, that did initiate the publication of DTC book series in 1960 with their long running 1960-67 LIFE World Library series, before it was two years later placed into the care of its newly established subsidiary.

Rise

After having tested the waters with the tentative 1960–61 trade paperback Time Capsule budget-priced book series publishing trial run, the new subsidiary started out for real in 1962 with the 1960-67 LIFE World Library hardback series it had inherited from its mother company, with the hardback slated to become the subsidiary's staple book release format. The by the general populace perceived cachet of the hardback format where quality of both format and contents were concerned, actually lined up fully with the intent of original publisher Jerome Hardy, who had declared early on that his publishing company would succeed through a strategy to "give the customer more than he has any right to expect." Several of these book series garnered substantial critical acclaim unusual for a mass-market mail order book club/retailer of which there were several in the era, most conspicuously that of contemporary competitor Reader's Digest. 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." Other examples standing out for their perceived picture/text quality included the 1970-72 LIFE 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 Lifes own vast archive of journalistic and art photographs from virtually every major contemporary photographer, remaining in print for over a decade besides spawning two spinoff photography series. 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, geography, the sciences, and 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". 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. 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 from 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 Mayan archeology in the 21st century, making the Time Life book entries on the subject obsolete and outdated. This even held true for their 1993 "The Magnificent Maya" outing in their more recent Lost Civilizations series.