The HarperCollins 200
With the help of booksellers and librarians from around the world, we’ve created this collection of 200 iconic HarperCollins titles—beloved books that have inspired, informed, entertained, and endured. Whether they are prizewinners, runaway bestsellers, groundbreaking nonfiction, or simply a favorite novel, these books have all had a singular influence on our literary culture.
Thanks to the following individuals who helped curate The HarperCollins 200:
Rick Brown
Rick Brown has been in the Christian book business for over thirty-one years as both a buyer and a publisher. He has been the beneficiary of wise counsel from many who have gone before him, and is greatly indebted to his predecessors and publishing peers. As a buyer of almost thirty years, Rick has seen the ups and downs of the industry and hopefully has had some influence on the “ups”! But the greatest part of his job is knowing that many of the books and Bibles he has worked on and worked with have had a positive influence on readers’ lives.
Mike Clarke
Mike Clarke is director for libraries in three London boroughs: Hammersmith and Fulham, Kensington and Chelsea, and Westminster. These cover twenty-one libraries, over 80,000 members, and 3 million library visitors a year. Mike is also a trustee of Spread the Word, London’s writer development agency, and has previously worked for Arts Council England and the London Libraries Development Agency.
Jamie Fiocco
Jamie Fiocco is the owner of Flyleaf Books in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Jamie worked in publishing for fifteen years before becoming a bookseller, and founded Flyleaf in 2009. She is past president of the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance and a current director on the board of the American Booksellers Association.
www.flyleafbooks.com
Cathy Langer
Cathy Langer began her bookselling career at the Tattered Cover in 1977. She is the director of buying for the Tattered Cover Book Store, which currently has three large stores and one tiny one, all located in metropolitan Denver. She is a past president of the Colorado Center for the Book and the Mountains and Plains Independent Booksellers Association, and a former board member of the American Booksellers Association. Last year she was on the 2015 Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence committee, an experience that was particularly satisfying as it gave her a peek into the library world. Cathy can be heard from time to time on Colorado Public Radio talking about books of regional interest.
www.tatteredcover.com
Jo McColl
My life has been intertwined with Unity Books since 1979 – my first full time job on leaving university. I now own and run the Auckland branch and co-own Unity Books Wellington with Tilly Lloyd. The two branches of Unity Books have always been fiercely independent and enjoy selling books from the world’s publishers every day, proving that New Zealand’s readers are up for everything! Life in the book trade is intellectually fulfilling, emotionally rewarding and full of fun. Every day at Unity is a world full of the best books from around the globe and a shop full of customers eager to share the love. My life is blessed.
http://unitybooks.nz/
Sheila O’Reilly
I am Events Manager at Village Books in Dulwich Village. I have been a bookseller for eighteen years, including as owner of Dulwich Books, which was voted the U.K. and Ireland’s Independent Bookshop of the Year in 2014. In the recent past I was a Costa Book Award biography judge, and a judge of the Independent Booksellers Week Book Award, and, most recently, a judge of the International Bookstore of the Year Award, London Book Fair 2016.
I love reading contemporary fiction, particularly debut novels, as well as biographies and autobiographies. Favourite authors include Anne Enright, Anne Tyler, Maggie O’Farrell, Ian McEwan, and Sarah Waters. The one book I want to read again is A Little Life; it would be my desert island book.
https://soreilly.com/
@SheilaWhoReads
Nancy Pearl
Nancy Pearl is a librarian and the author of Book Lust: Recommended Reading for Every Mood, Moment, and Reason, and its three companion volumes. She reviews books regularly for NPR’s Morning Edition and tweets about books and reading at @Nancy_Pearl. Her podcast, That Stack of Books, is available from iTunes.
@Nancy_Pearl
Mark Rubbo
Mark Rubbo is managing director of Readings in Melbourne, which was awarded International Bookstore of the Year for 2016 at the London Book Fair. He is a past president of the Australian Booksellers Association and founding chair of the Melbourne Writers Festival. In 2009 he founded The Readings Foundation, which supports literacy, community, and the arts, and he serves on the boards of the Wheeler Centre and the Indigenous Literacy Foundation. He has been a judge of the Melbourne Prize, the Miles Franklin Literary Award, and the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards.
www.readings.com.au
Kate Skipper
Kate Skipper is the buying director at Waterstones, the U.K. and Eire’s leading high street bookseller with 275 shops. Waterstones is the only national specialist book retailer of scale in the U.K., employing over 3,000 booksellers. Kate leads a small, central team of buyers as well as sixty field-based regional specialists who are responsible for commercially managing clusters of shops across the estate.
www.waterstones.com
@waterstones
Lisa Von Drasek
Lisa Von Drasek is the curator of the Children’s Literature Research Collections of the University of Minnesota Libraries. These archives hold over 100,000 pieces of materials related to children’s books: manuscripts, original art, and signed first editions as well as artists’, writers’, and editorial research, notes, and correspondence.
Lisa’s goals are to share these resources internationally. Here is a sample of that work: http://gallery.lib.umn.edu/exhibits/show/balloons-over-broadway. Formerly the teacher/librarian at Bank Street College of Education School for Children, she also served as the director of the Center for Children’s Literature. Lisa blogs at EarlyWord.com.
Jessica Walker
Jessica Walker is the managing partner at Munro’s Books in Victoria, British Columbia. A bookseller for thirty years, she and three partners took over the business from Jim Munro in 2014. Founded by Jim and Alice Munro in 1963, Munro’s Books is a legendary Canadian bookstore, and it regularly appears on lists of best and beautiful bookstores to see around the world.
www.munrobooks.com