Apax Partners may not be a household name--but it does want to be a schoolroom name. The UK-based private equity firm snapped up Thomson Learning in 2007 for $7.1 billion and renamed it Cengage Learning. It added the Houghton Mifflin College Division to the portfolio in 2008. Last week it purchased National Geographic Society's school-publishing unit and also grabbed rights to use the non-profit's content.
