The Cahners have left the building
Its gradual demise lacks the éclat of the Gillette takeover, the disappearance of Fleet Bank, or the offshoring of John Hancock, but Cahners Publishing Company's death by a thousand cuts has had a significant impact on civic life in Boston.
The name of Norman Cahners, the hustling young Harvard grad who turned a Navy inventory newsletter called ''The Palletizer" into a trade publishing empire, was quietly removed from the company's signature Newton Corner headquarters a while back. Now the Boston-area staff is leaving the building entirely.
The 300 remaining employees, buffeted by successive rounds of layoffs implemented by their Anglo-Dutch overseers at Reed Elsevier PLC, are moving to Waltham, grumbling all the way. You can get a whiff of company morale by reading the forum pages at excahns.com -- a site that has been blocked at Cahners headquarters. Reed executive Greg Flores says those comments are not representative: ''We measure morale, and there has been significant improvement in the past three years."
The purge of the Cahners name was completed two years ago, when the founder's daughter Nancy was summoned to Newton to remove her father's portrait. The painting had been removed from the lobby and placed in a little-used conference room. ''The handoff was so clumsy, they wouldn't even let me in the building," Cahners recalls. ''They gave me the painting in the garage."
Things weren't always like this. Norman Cahners and his partner Saul Goldweitz pioneered the unglamorous but extremely lucrative business of industry-specific magazines often mailed free to decision makers in various trades. Their titles included Modern Materials Handling, Government Computer News, and Cheese Market News (''the Wall Street Journal of cheese," Cahners claimed), as well as better-known trade publications, such as Variety.
''In trade publishing, he was the god," recalls International Data Group chief executive Pat Kenealy, who started his career in the original Columbus Avenue Cahners Building -- now home to the fashionable eatery Mistral -- with the now-defunct magazine Mini-Micro Systems. ''Norm had a family business that was run like a family business because he had benign overseas owners" -- London-based Reed Publishing, which bought Cahners in 1977.
''That changed when the Dutch came along," says former Cahners chief executive Robert Krakoff. From 1993 on, when Reed merged with Netherlands-based
The headquarters was indeed shifted to Manhattan, and soon the new bosses carried out their de-Cahners-ification program. To be fair, there have been some positive consequences of the Reed Elsevier regime. ''When I joined the company [about 10 years ago], I almost turned around and went home because there was nowhere to park my car," one employee e-mailed me this week. ''Now, you can park anywhere you want. Rows after rows of cubes are completely empty. Half the floors are always dark."
In the not-so-distant future, one can imagine a couple relaxing in the Cabot-Cahners room in Symphony Hall, taking in a lecture at the Cahners Theater in the Museum of Science, or strolling in front of Cahners Hall at Northeastern University, and asking themselves: ''I wonder who they were?"
Out there
Publishers Weekly -- once a Cahners publication -- has a favorable review of Laura Waterman's forthcoming book, ''Losing the Garden: The Story of a Marriage." She was married for 30 years to Guy Waterman, a
PW liked Brown's book, too, calling it a ''portrait of multitalented, enigmatic outdoorsman Guy Waterman, whose son Jon's climbing-related death was chronicled in Jon Krakauer's 'Into the Wild.' "
Alex Beam is a Globe columnist. His e-dress is beam@globe.com. 