Category: Stories

The Transformation of Harlequin

By the 1990s, Harlequin had become synonymous with romance novels, grown the category into a score of successful subgenre lines, opened offices around the world, and seen its books made available in more than 100 countries and 30 languages. More

New Naturalists

William Collins V (known as Billy Collins) and the printers AdPrint came up with the idea of the New Naturalist Library in 1942. More

Canada’s White Circle Pocket Editions

In response to global paper shortages during World War II, Canada began manufacturing books for international markets in 1941. More

The Publisher of presidents

HarperCollins is the publisher of many United States presidents–beginning with the very first one. More

Amistad

HarperCollins’s Amistad Press is the oldest imprint devoted to titles for the African American market at any major New York publishing house. More

The HarperCollins Logo

The HarperCollins logo represents the 1990 consolidation of Harper & Row, based in New York, and Collins Publishers, based in London and Glasgow. More

Inventing the Western

Zane Grey and A. B. Guthrie Jr. were considered two of the foremost writers on the American West. More

Science Fiction & Fantasy

HarperCollins’s connections to nascent science fiction and fantasy worlds began with works such as Edward Lytton Bulwer’s The Coming Race (1871), and H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds (1898) and The Invisible Man (1898). More

Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus

While giving a talk to a group of men and women about relationships, author John Gray realized he had a hook for a new book. More

HarperOne

In 1977, a handful of Harper & Row employees from the Religious Books Department moved from New York to San Francisco to focus on titles pertaining to mind, body, and spirit. More

Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World

One of Harper & Brothers’ most famous and influential authors was Aldous Huxley, who signed with the publisher in 1927 and published his first book, Texts and Pretexts, with them in 1932. More

Gabriel García Márquez

Gabriel García Márquez drew on his childhood experiences in Colombia when crafting the story of the fictional Buendía family in the classic One Hundred Years of Solitude. More

William Collins

Born on the south side of Glasgow in the village of Pollokshaws in 1789, William Collins left school to work as a weaver and clerk in a local cotton mill. More

Profiles in Courage

Harper & Brothers helped groom the image of a future president when it agreed in the mid-1950s to work with a young senator on a collection of biographical sketches about courageous American lawmakers. More

Collins Reference and Education

William Collins spent his earliest years teaching before starting his publishing venture in 1819. More

The Growth of Harlequin Romance

Lawrence Heisey, a former soap salesman who had been appointed president of Harlequin in 1971, revolutionized romance publishing by distributing Harlequin romances to supermarkets and department stores, where they would be right at the fingertips of Canadian and American homemakers. More

Caedmon Records and Audiobooks

In 1952, Barbara Cohen and Marianne Roney, a pair of recent college graduates, wrote a letter to Welsh poet Dylan Thomas that contained an unusual business proposal. More

How Harlequin Became Romance

When Richard H.G. Bonnycastle, a former Arctic explorer with the Hudson Bay Company, launched Harlequin Books in Winnipeg in 1948, he had little interest in building a publishing empire around romance novels. More

George R. R. Martin

It was in 1993 that George R. R. Martin–already an acclaimed author of science fiction and horror novels, and well known for his work in Hollywood as a screenwriter on The Twilight Zone and Beauty and the Beast–decided he needed a broader outlet for his creativity and conceived of A Song of Ice and Fire, a truly monumental fantasy series. More

New King James Version of the Bible

In the mid-1970s Bible publisher Thomas Nelson found itself with extra capital and decided to channel these profits into the New King James Version of the Bible. More

The New International Version of the Bible

The efforts of one man in the mid-1950s brought about the publication of the New International Version of the Bible, a contemporary English translation that provided an accurate and understandable alternative to the King James Version, which had been the dominant translation for centuries. More

Zondervan

Launched during the Great Depression in the spare bedroom of a Michigan farmhouse, the publishing house of Zondervan was never a conventional religious publisher. More

Thomas Nelson: Growth

By 1844, Thomas Nelson’s company had grown large enough to open an office in London, under the leadership of Thomas Nelson Jr. and William Nelson. More

Nelson and Sons at Work

In 1845 Thomas Nelson and Sons moved its operations to a printing works at Hope Park in Scotland, big enough for its growing staff of more than 400. More

Thomas Nelson: The Beginning

In 1800, an upstart 20-year-old printer named Thomas Neilson (who later changed his name to Nelson) set off a firestorm of controversy throughout the Scottish publishing world by offering something never before seen in Great Britain: classic books produced and printed for “the common man.” More

Textbook Publishing: Row, Peterson & Co.

Robert Row was a textbook author and teacher. More

J. B. Lippincott

Born in 1813 in New Jersey, Joshua Ballinger Lippincott became a bookseller shortly after he moved to Philadelphia at age 14. More

From Clerk to Chairman of the Board

One summer day in 1884, Horatio Harper, grandson of founder John Harper, began talking with a bright young boy during his regular steamboat commute from Long Island to Manhattan. More

Eugene Exman and Martin Luther King

Shortly after the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955 and ‘56, Harper & Brothers religious books editor Eugene Exman left New York City for Alabama and secured a meeting with Martin Luther King Jr. More

Bernard Cornwell

Born in London in 1944, Bernard Cornwell grew up in Essex and, after a stint as a teacher, moved on to the BBC, where he took a job as a producer in Northern Ireland. More

Angus & Robertson in Australia

Ten thousand miles from his homeland, Scotsman David Mackenzie Angus paid £50 to open a small bookshop on Market Street in Sydney, Australia. More

The Birth of Perry Mason

Head of William Morrow and Company (later acquired by HarperCollins) since the death of its founder in 1931, Thayer Hobson searched widely for promising new authors, often traveling to Europe in pursuit of his next big title. More

Agatha Christie

The house of Collins acquired “Queen of Crime” Agatha Christie after she disagreed with her former publisher over the spelling of “coco”/”cocoa” in her first book, The Mysterious Affair at Styles. More

Crime & Mystery At HarperCollins

In 1860, Harper & Brothers had paid Wilkie Collins £750 for The Woman in White, which heralded the publisher’s entry into the crime and mystery genre. More

To Kill a Mockingbird

When J. B. Lippincott (later acquired by HarperCollins) editor Therese (Tay) von Hohoff saw the first draft of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird (1960), she saw a promising story, but one in need of some reshaping and editing. More

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

Betty Smith's A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1943), a story about growing up poor in turn-of-the-century Brooklyn, was originally an entry for a Harper & Brothers memoir contest. More

Collins Operations during WWII

Collins maintained combined office and warehouse space at Bridewell Place in London for many years, and in 1917, its new London publishing office at 48 Pall Mall was complemented by printing works in Mayfair that included a state-of-the-art bindery, warehouse, and distribution center. More

Social Change: Sex in the 20th Century

In between the two world wars, Harper authors tackled the then taboo subject of sex. More

Social Change: Civil Rights

Beginning with This Is My Story (1937), Harper & Brothers published many works by Eleanor Roosevelt that promoted civil rights and the need for government action, including This I Remember (1949), On My Own (1958), and Tomorrow Is Now (1963). More

Social Change: African American Identity in the U.S.

HarperCollins has published a number of books that explore the racial identity of African Americans during periods of great social conflict. More

Social Change: Collins Gives Back

In the UK, William Collins II of Collins and Sons took up labor causes, especially child labor. More

Social Change: Thomas Nast, Illustrator

Illustrator Thomas Nast first made his name documenting the Civil War in all its gruesome reality, but he is best known for developing the political cartoon form and our modern depictions of Santa Claus. More

Social Change: The Harper Brothers and The American Civil War

Literacy became both a predictor of and influence on the American Civil War, being one of the disparities between North and South. More

Social Change: Women Writers

In the mid-late 1800s, Harper & Brothers reprinted several milestone titles in the history of British feminist literature as well as the global canon, such as Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847), Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), and Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848), as well as George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1872). More

Ben-Hur

Lew Wallace, a Union general in the Civil War, wrote the biblical novel Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ in 1880. More

C.S. Lewis and Christianity

Born in 1898 in Belfast, Clive Staples Lewis lost his faith in Christianity at a young age after his mother died and he was sent away to boarding school. More

The Inklings

Clive Staples Lewis (better known as C. S. Lewis) loved nothing more than sitting in the back room of his favorite pub, The Eagle and Child, surrounded by his closest literary friends, including J. R. R. Tolkien. More

J.R.R. Tolkien and the Trilogy

Sir Stanley Unwin, chairman of British publishers George Allen & Unwin (later acquired by HarperCollins), originally rejected the 9,250-page manuscript of The Lord of the Rings, the sequel to J. R. R. Tolkien’s moderately successful (at the time) The Hobbit, as it was too long, and the author would make a deal with the publisher only if they also agreed to take another of his unfinished books. More

The Hobbit

In October 1936, Stanley Unwin, chairman of British publishers George Allen & Unwin (later acquired by HarperCollins), received a children’s book submission. More

Building Literary Identities: Canada, Australia, India

In the mid-1800s, William Collins took his UK publishing business international–from the Americas, through Australia, to Africa. More