Presses Universitaires de France
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Presses Universitaires de France or PUF (University Presses of France), founded in 1921 by academics, is the largest French university publishing house.
The financial and legal structure of the Presses Universitaires de France were completely restructured in 2000 and the original cooperative structure was abandoned. Companies that took stakes in PUF included Flammarion Publishing (17% in 2000, 18% currently) and insurer Maaf Assurances (9%, 8% currently). In 2006, another insurance giant Garantie mutuelle des fonctionnaires (GMF) injected capital into the PUF, taking a 16,4% stake in the publisher. A similar tendency toward the constitution of an oligopoly has been observed by French newspapers, with titles like Le Monde, Libération or even L'Humanité accepting to turn themselves toward private financing.
Almost all French students know the collection Que sais-je? (a quote from Montaigne: "What do I know?"), created in 1941 by Paul Angoulvent. The collection is based on a unique format of 128 pages, in which specialists are invited to ruminate a specific theme. Today, there are more than 1,300 titles, constituting a vast encyclopedia covering a broad range of subjects. Many of the titles have been translated into up to forty-three languages, while the PUF have sold around 160 million books since first published.
