Tag: Collins

Letter from “Padington”

Letter from “Padington”
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

The Pre-Packaged Library

An advertisement for the Collins Select Library of Christian Authors, which ran in The School Newspaper on January 2, 1882.
The Harper brothers created collections of titles that allowed readers to amass an entire library instead of buying just a single book. More

Crime & Mystery At HarperCollins

The Case of the Velvet Claws by Erle Stanley Gardner (William Morrow, 1933) and The Corpse in the Green Pyjamas by R. A. J. Walling (Avon Books, 1941).
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

Letter from Agatha Christie

Letter from Agatha Christie
This letter from Agatha Christie (here signing with her second married name, Mallowan) shows the close relationship she had with Collins publisher Billy Collins. More

Agatha Christie

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

Doctor Zhivago

Doctor Zhivago
Collins was the first to publish this epic romantic drama by the Nobel Prize winner in English. More

The HarperCollins Logo

The Harper “fire” and Collins “water” colophons, which were combined to create today’s “fire and water” 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

1903: Collins is the first to publish illustrated shilling-priced paperbacks…

Collins' Clear-type Press.
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

The Hobbit

The Hobbit
J. R. R. Tolkien’s enchanting tale became an instant success when it was first published. More

A Bear Called Paddington

An early cover layout for A Bear Called Paddington by Michael Bond, published by Collins in 1958.
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