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
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
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
In this letter to Collins publisher Billy Collins, dated November 1954, C. S. Lewis—author of The Chronicles of Narnia series, Mere Christianity, and The Screwtape Letters, among others—outlines what he sees as his three types of “literary output”: “A. Religious and General. B. Fiction. C. Academic.” More
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
Collins is the first to publish a series of illustrated, shilling-priced pocket size classics with the introduction of Collins Illustrated Pocket Classics. Included in this series are a maroon cloth-bound David Copperfield, many other Charles Dickens favorites, Sir Walter Scott’s Kenilworth, George Eliot’s Adam Bede, and Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley. More
Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel, published by HarperCollins in the UK, wins the Man Booker Prize. Mantel becomes the first woman ever to win the prize twice, having first won for Wolf Hall in 2009. 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
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
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
At the turn of the century, William Collins III combined innovative packaging and distribution with innovative aesthetics by creating shilling-priced illustrated paperbacks. More
Here you can see the progression of the cover art for the Collins Crime Club title Nothing is the Number When You Die by Joan Fleming (circa 1940s). More
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