The story
Lew Addison Cummings and Melbourne Wesley Cummings founded Addison–Wesley in 1942, with the first book published by Addison–Wesley being Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Francis Weston Sears' Mechanics.
Its first computer book was Programs for an Electronic Digital Computer, by Wilkes, Wheeler, and Gill. In 1977, Addison–Wesley acquired W. A. Benjamin Company, and merged it with the Cummings division of the company to form Benjamin Cummings. It was purchased by the global publishing and education company Pearson PLC in 1988 and became part of Addison Wesley Longman in 1994. The trade publishing division of Addison–Wesley was sold to Perseus Books Group in 1997, leaving Addison–Wesley as solely an educational publisher. Pearson acquired the educational division of Simon & Schuster in 1998, and merged it with Addison Wesley Longman to form Pearson Education and subsequently rebranded to Pearson in 2011. Pearson moved the former Addison Wesley Longman offices from Reading, Massachusetts, to Boston in 2004. Its current executives hail from the original Addison–Wesley with a storied history of their own.
From Wikipedia’s article on Addison-Wesley, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.4