Category: Stories

Judith Kerr: Beyond The Tiger Who Came to Tea

Collins author Judith Kerr may be best known in the UK for her classic children’s picture books The Tiger Who Came to Tea and Mog the Forgetful Cat, but she is also renowned for her powerful autobiographical novels about her childhood and young adulthood. More

A Bear Called Paddington

In 1958, an editor at Collins named Barbara Ker Wilson received a manuscript submission about a talking bear, which she opened with “initial suspicion” —as the publisher had received many other proposals featuring humanized animals that “are invariably either whimsy-whamsy, written down, or filled with adult innuendoes.” More

Education and Publishing

Beginning in 1830, the Harper brothers believed that the increasingly literate populace might clamor for turnkey collections. More

Garth Williams, Illustrator

Garth Williams was a little-known but talented young illustrator when he was commissioned by Ursula Nordstrom, head of Harper’s Department of Books for Boys and Girls, to illustrate the classic Stuart Little by E. B. White. More

The Look of Stuart Little

In early 1945, Ursula Nordstrom, head of Harper’s Department of Books for Boys and Girls was awaiting completion of E. B. White’s manuscript for a children’s story about a talking mouse, titled Stuart Little. More

I Can Read!

Inspired by an occasion in which she attempted to find an appropriate book for a young boy who had just learned to read, Boston librarian Virginia Haviland telephoned her friend Ursula Nordstrom, the head of children’s publishing at Harper & Brothers. More

Becoming Children’s Authors: Sendak, Silverstein And Ursula Nordstrom

Neither Maurice Sendak nor Shel Silverstein started their careers with children’s literature as a focus. More

Ursula Nordstrom

When Anne Carroll Moore, the powerful and opinionated superintendent of children’s work at the New York Public Library, asked Harper & Brothers editor Ursula Nordstrom why she felt qualified to produce children’s books, Nordstrom said only this: “Well, I am a former child, and I haven’t forgotten a thing.” More

Pushing the Boundaries of Children’s Literature

Children’s books explored uncharted territory in the mid-1960s as Harper & Row began to champion boundary-pushing children’s and young adult books. More

The History of HarperCollins Children’s Books in the U.S.

The Department of Books for Boys and Girls at Harper was established in the U.S. in 1926. More

Publishing Firsts: Producing Books Electronically

Although word-processing programs and electronic typewriters had been around since the late 1960s, Harper & Row was the first to help pioneer electronic publishing with Andrew Garve’s The Long Short Cut in 1968, which was, according to the New York Times, “the first book set into type completely by electronic composition.” More

Publishing Firsts: The NIV and NKJV Bible

In 1965, members from the Christian Reformed Church and a broad spectrum of evangelical churches, denominations, and organizations came together to discuss the creation of a new contemporary translation of the Bible. More

Publishing Firsts: The Historical Romance Genre

At the time of its publication in 1972, nothing like Kathleen Woodiwiss’s The Flame and the Flower had ever been published. More

Publishing Firsts: The VendAvon

Chips, cookies, sodas–and books–from a vending machine. Avon’s entertaining comic books—western, horror, romance, war, science fiction, and gangster titles, mostly—appealed to readers of all ages from 1945 through the mid-1950s. More

Publishing Firsts: Fontana

In 1936 Collins became the first major publishing house to create its own font. More

Publishing Firsts: Collins Illustrated Pocket Classics

At the turn of the century, William Collins III combined innovative packaging and distribution with innovative aesthetics by creating shilling-priced illustrated paperbacks. More

Publishing Firsts: The Rotary Press

American inventor Richard Hoe’s 1847 four-cylinder rotary press helped increase printing output tenfold, to 8,000 pages per hour. More

“The Most Beautiful Printing Ever Done”

James Harper went to Europe in 1835 to compile a set of fairy tales for publication, and Harper & Brothers enlisted Joseph A. Adams to make 81 detailed wood-cut engravings for the collection. More

Incidents of Travel in Yucatán

In 1839, American diplomat John Lloyd Stephens and British artist Frederick Catherwood—both already celebrated for their adventures in Egypt, the Holy Land, Greece, and Rome—sailed together out of New York harbor on an expedition into the forbidding rain forests of present-day Honduras, Guatemala, and Mexico. More

The Steam-Powered Press

For years, the Harper brothers relied on a white draft horse named Dobbin, who plodded a circular path in the basement of their offices, turning a wooden shaft that powered the Treadwell hand press two floors above, until new technology sent him out to pasture. More

Publishing Firsts: Stereotyping

The Harper brothers first began publishing in the early 1800s, when emerging technologies were fundamentally changing the process of printing–replacing the painstaking compositing, inking, and pulling processes needed for each page. More

From Printers to Publishers

James and John Harper began their business in 1817 primarily as printers, although they soon began to publish and sell original works. More

Mark Twain

In 1866, with mostly newspaper articles and other short works to his name, Mark Twain accepted an assignment from the Sacramento Union to produce a weekly column from Hawaii. More

Periodicals: Harper’s Weekly, Harper’s New Monthly and Harper’s Bazaar

The Harper brothers consistently sought ways to reach more readers with less expensive publications, and in 1850 they revolutionized the concept of the modern literary magazine with Harper’s New Monthly Magazine. More

The Pre-Packaged Library

The Harper brothers created collections of titles that allowed readers to amass an entire library instead of buying just a single book. More

George Eliot

Mary Anne Evans, born in 1819, led a turbulent life that often broke with Victorian social norms. More

Herman Melville and Moby-Dick

Harper & Brothers turned down Herman Melville’s first book, Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life, and it was released to strong sales by another publisher. More

The Harper Fire of 1853

The Harper offices in New York City were claimed by fire in 1853, when a plumber lit a lamp with a roll of paper and then attempted to extinguish the burning roll in a tub of water. More

Early Offices

Thomas Nelson’s bookshop once sat in a half-timbered storefront at 7 West Bow in Edinburgh, one of many rickety buildings rising precariously from the Z-shaped street like upside-down pyramids. More

Founded on Religion

Though a shared love of the written word inspired those who laid the foundation of HarperCollins, spreading Christian principles was a calling for them. More

James Harper, Mayor Of New York City

With corruption rampant in New York City politics, the newly formed American Republican Party convinced James Harper, one of the brothers who had founded J. & J. Harper in 1817, to run for mayor. More

Protectors Of Authors’ Rights

In the early 1800s, American publishers were notorious for reprinting titles from overseas at a fraction of the price, and without payment to authors. More

The Rise and Fall of the Harper Rule

In the early 1800s, American printers had no qualms about pirating books from abroad and selling them at discount prices. More

200 Years of HarperCollins Publishers

HarperCollins Publishers began as J. & J. Harper, a small family printing shop run by brothers James and John Harper in New York City in March 1817. More