Richard Robinson turned Scholastic into an empire
Richard Robinson, who took over his father’s magazine company, Scholastic, and transformed it into a behemoth in the children’s book industry with the “Harry Potter” and “Hunger Games” series and titles like “The Magic School Bus” and “Goosebumps,” died Saturday in Chilmark, Massachusetts, on Martha’s Vineyard. He was 84.
His son Maurice said the cause was a sudden stroke or heart attack while Robinson was out for a walk near the family’s home on the island. He lived in Greenwich Village.
Under Robinson, the company generated as much as $1.6 billion in annual revenue to become the largest publisher and distributor of children’s books
in the world.
In 2000, Scholastic acquired Grolier, one of the largest encyclopedia publishers.
Scholastic shattered sales records by venturing into unchartered territory with Suzanne Collins’ youngadult dystopian novels in the “The Hunger Games” trilogy, which roosted on The New York Times bestseller lists for more than 260 consecutive weeks, and by acquiring the American rights from Bloomsbury for J.K. Rowling’s blockbuster series on the boy wizard Harry Potter; those books first appeared in the United States under Scholastic’s Arthur A. Levine imprint. Scholastic’s trade publishing division has sold 180 million copies in the Potter series since 1998.
“Research says that if children choose and own their books, they are much more likely to finish them,” he said in 2017, when he accepted the Literarian Award from the National Book Foundation.
Part of Scholastic’s mission, he said, was to address relevant public issues and even subjects that had been taboo in children’s literature.
Maurice Richard Robinson Jr. was born May 15, 1937, to Maurice and Florence (Liddell) Robinson and grew up in and around New York City.
His father, returning from World War I and noticing an increase in high school enrollment, started his magazine company, the Western Pennsylvania Scholastic, in 1920. It did not become profitable until the 1950s, but the elder Robinson stuck with it.
“We’re big, from filling in the niches,” his son said.
Richard graduated from Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire and, magna cum laude, from Harvard College with a bachelor’s degree in English. He later studied at St. Catharine’s College, part of the University of Cambridge in England, and at Teachers College at Columbia University.
In 1986, he married Helen V. Benham, who worked for 33 years at Scholastic as an editorial director, publisher and corporate vice president; they divorced in 2003, but she remained a confidante.
In addition to his son Maurice, who is known as Reece and who was a consultant to Scholastic, his survivors include another son, John, who also consulted with the company; a brother, William; and three sisters, Sue Morrill, Barbara Buckland and Dover Ford.
When he was a child, Robinson recalled, he never tired of hearing his mother read to him from “The Little Engine That Could” and “Mr. Popper’s Penguins.” His favorite novel of all time, he told The Times in 1999, was James Joyce’s first novel, “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,” which inspired him as publisher of Scholastic.
Joyce’s novel was a coming-of-age story but by no means a children’s book. It begins, though, as many a fanciful story for young readers might, with the words “Once upon a time.”