The story
Basic Books originated as a small Greenwich Village-based book club marketed to psychoanalysts. Arthur Rosenthal took over the book club in 1950, and under his ownership it soon began producing original books, mostly in the behavioral sciences. Early successes included Ernest Jones's The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, as well as works by Claude Lévi-Strauss, Jean Piaget and Erik Erikson. The "godfather of neoconservatism", Irving Kristol, joined Basic Books in 1960, and helped Basic to expand into the social sciences. Harper & Row purchased the company in 1969.
In 1997, HarperCollins announced that it would merge Basic Books into its trade publishing program, effectively closing the imprint and ending its publishing of serious academic books. That same year, Basic was purchased by the newly created Perseus Books Group. Perseus's publishing business was acquired by Hachette Book Group in 2016. In 2018, Seal Press became an imprint of Basic.
From Wikipedia’s article on Basic Books, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.4