In 1980, Beaufort Books entered the publishing world as the US branch of a well-known Canadian publishing company. The company’s earliest list focused on fiction and children’s books.

Coincidentally, after leaving his position at Simon & Schuster, Eric affiliated with Delilah Communications (1981) with the understanding that Eric would become a partner. However, after working with Delilah for approximately 4 months, Eric started his own sales and distribution company, Kampmann & Company. He set out in the fall of 1981 to find publishing prospects for distribution. Soon, Eric met with the founders of Beaufort Books at their New York City office, several hours later, he left the office, located at 9 E 40th St, as Beaufort’s newest sales consultant.

With Eric’s consulting help, Beaufort’s list of titles grew significantly. In addition, in 1983, Beaufort Books moved from Scribner Publishing Company to Kampmann & Company, becoming Kampmann’s largest distribution client. By 1984, the Candian owners of Beaufort approached Eric with a proposal to buy the company, a proposition to which he agreed.

Throughout the next several years, under Eric’s direction, Beaufort published numerous bestsellers, including Michael Jackson: Body and Soul, an illustrated biography of the late artist’s unforgettable career; Home Before Morning, a Book of the Month pick that became known as the first memoir written by a military nurse who served in Vietnam; and I Shall Live, Henry Orenstein’s harrowing and poignant account of surviving and escaping a concentration camp in Hitler’s Germany. It was this book that would define and inspire Beaufort’s current objective of publishing well-written, moving stories that encapsulate the human experience.

Like many companies, however, Beaufort’s history had is ups and downs, and in 1988, Beaufort discontinued its active front list publishing program. In 1996, Kampmann & Co. became known as Midpoint Book Sales and Distribution, and Eric soon realized the company needed a publishing arm to help self-published authors reach more readers. This led to the reopening of Beaufort Books and the subsequent publication of numerous fiction and non-fiction titles.

Most notable of these titles was the publication of If I Did It by the Goldman family, a book that seemingly changed the modern-day face of Beaufort Books. In 2007, more than a decade after the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman, O.J. Simpson signed a million-dollar book deal with a large publishing house to publish a faux autobiography about the murders, called If I Did It. After widespread public outrage over the book, the publication was canceled, the contract was returned to Simpson, and the publishing company was left with more than 400,000 copies of the book sitting in the warehouse.