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Time-Life Records |
The Time-Life company was founded by Time, Incorporated in 1961 as a book marketing division. It takes its name from Time and Life magazines, two of the most popular weeklies of the era. It was based in the Time-Life building in Rockefeller Center.
Time-Life is a book, music, and video marketer, that since 2003 has been owned by a private equity company Ripplewood Holdings. Since 2003, Direct Holdings US Corp is the legal name of Time Life, and is no longer owned by its former parent Time Warner. In March 2007, Ripplewood led a group that took Readers Digest Corporation private and has since put Time Life as a division of RDA.
The British television company, Time-Life Television was a producer of BBC programs, which was renamed Lionheart Television in 1982.
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Time Life gained fame as a seller of book series that would be mailed to households in monthly installments. Several of these book series garnered substantial critical acclaim unusual for a mass-market mail order house. For example, the series Library of Photography of the early-1970s featured very high-quality duo-tone printing for its black-and-white reproductions in its original edition, and was of course able to draw on Life Magazine's vast archive of journalistic and art photographs from virtually every major photographer; Foods Of The World featured contributions by M.F.K. Fisher, James Beard, Julia Child, Craig Claiborne and many others; and The Good Cook series, edited by Richard Olney, featured contributions from Jeremiah Tower, Jane Grigson, Michel Lemonnier and many others. Other series of high regard covered nature and the sciences, as well as the history of world civilizations. The science books are interesting as ephemera of their time. The content of these series was more or less encyclopedic, providing the basics of the subjects in the way it might be done in a lecture aimed at the general public. There was also a series on comtemporary life in various countries of the world. Some other series are much less highly regarded, especially the later output as the publisher moved away from soberly presented science and history towards sensationalism, pop-history, and DIY-themed books. The books, whatever their quality, are easy to find at low prices on the used-book market, due to their being published in the millions of copies.
Time-Life no longer publishes books. The likely cause is that production and printing costs reached the point where people were unwilling to purchase them, even directly from the publisher. It is also possible that people are reading fewer educational or informative books.
Time–Life added music in 1962, selling box sets and collections through Time–Life Records, eventually advertising these collections through infomercials (including Superstars of Country and 70's Music Explosion), which often air in the early morning (3 am to 6 am). When Time merged with Warner Communications in 1989, the label became a Time Warner division. Warner Music Group, which grouped all of Time-Warner's music companies, was sold to a group of investors led by Edgar Bronfman, Jr. in late 2003.
A key selling point of these collections is that each track was digitally transferred to CD using the original master recordings, as opposed to being "re-records" whereby only an old phonograph record, or an old radio copy is used for the transfer.
The following list shows many of the collections the company has released, but is by no means exhaustive.
In recent years, the company has been subject to bad press due to questionable billing practices. Some customers claim that they have been tricked into purchasing multiple CDs from Time-Life. Buyers, wishing to purchase single CDs, don't fully understand that they are entering into "Continuity Programs," despite the publications clearly stating "then, preview other volumes" in the commercials. In the small print, however, it mentions that unless the customer cancels the account, Time-Life will send a CD album tri-weekly, automatically billing the credit card. The customer's account will be refunded upon returning the CDs, and he or she can call customer service to cancel at any time, whereas services such as BMG Music Service and Columbia House (which have since merged) require the customer to buy a certain number of CDs before they can cancel.
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