“Queen of Crime” Agatha Christie joins the house of Collins, and two years later publishes her seminal Hercule Poirot novel, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd.More
Mark Twain signs an exclusive contract with Harper & Brothers, which serializes Joan of Arc in its periodicals and publishes it as a book one year later. More
The I Can Read! series launches with the publication of Little Bear, written by Else Holmelund Minarik and illustrated by Maurice Sendak, and becomes the number one beginning reader series in the United States. More
Agatha Christie, known throughout the world as the Queen of Crime, is the best-selling novelist in history, outsold only by the Bible and Shakespeare. More
Signed with a paw print, this letter from “Padington” (circa 1966) was sent to Australian booksellers and sales staff, encouraging them to sell the latest Paddington title. More
Publisher George Allen & Unwin, later purchased by HarperCollins, publishes the 9,250-page manuscript of The Lord of the Rings, by J.R.R. Tolkien. More
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
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
Harper & Row publishes the first English translation of One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez, establishing him as a leading young Latin American writer and a dominant and innovative figure on the global literary scene. More
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
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
In October 1936, Stanley Unwin, chairman of British publishers George Allen & Unwin (later acquired by HarperCollins), received a children’s book submission. More
J. B. Lippincott publishes the Pulitzer Prize–winning To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, one of the most influential books on race in America, which goes on to sell more than 40 million copies. More