The story
American Book Company was formed in 1890 by the consolidation of Van Antwerp, Bragg and Co., A.S. Barnes & Co., D. Appleton and Co., and Ivison, Blakeman and Co. It was acquired by Litton Industries in 1967 and existed as a division of Litton Educational Publishing, Inc. until being sold to the International Thomson Organization in 1981. Thomson then sold its American Book Company K-12 assets to D. C. Heath and Company in 1981. The company was absorbed into D. C. Heath and ceased to exist as an imprint. Any remaining K-12 assets of the American Book Company are now owned by Houghton Mifflin (now Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), which acquired D. C. Heath and Company in 1995.
Many of the college level textbook rights of ABC/Litton were sold by International Thomson as well, to Van Nostrand Reinhold, though some remained under the Wadsworth imprint at Thomson, which is now Cengage Learning.
From Wikipedia’s article on American Book Company (1890), shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.4