Tag: Expanding literature

The Growth of Harlequin Romance

Lawrence Heisey, a former soap salesman who was appointed president of Harlequin in 1971.
Lawrence Heisey, a former soap salesman who had been appointed president of Harlequin in 1971, revolutionized romance publishing by distributing Harlequin romances to supermarkets and department stores, where they would be right at the fingertips of Canadian and American homemakers. 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

The Transformation of Harlequin

A collection of titles published by Harlequin.
By the 1990s, Harlequin had become synonymous with romance novels, grown the category into a score of successful subgenre lines, opened offices around the world, and seen its books made available in more than 100 countries and 30 languages. More

How Harlequin Became Romance

The Hospital in Buwambo by Anne Vinton, Harlequin’s first reprint (1957) of a Mills & Boon romance.
When Richard H.G. Bonnycastle, a former Arctic explorer with the Hudson Bay Company, launched Harlequin Books in Winnipeg in 1948, he had little interest in building a publishing empire around romance novels. More

Gabriel García Márquez

Telegram dated October 21, 1982, in which Harper editor Cass Canfield Jr. congratulates Gabriel García Márquez on winning the Pulitzer Prize for One Hundred Years of Solitude.
Gabriel García Márquez drew on his childhood experiences in Colombia when crafting the story of the fictional Buendía family in the classic One Hundred Years of Solitude. More

George Eliot

A snippet of the first installment of Middlemarch by George Eliot, which was serialized in Harper’s Weekly (December 16, 1871).
Mary Anne Evans, born in 1819, led a turbulent life that often broke with Victorian social norms. More

Zondervan

Women of the Old Testament by Abraham Kuyper, the first book published by Zondervan, circa 1933.
Launched during the Great Depression in the spare bedroom of a Michigan farmhouse, the publishing house of Zondervan was never a conventional religious publisher. More

Middlemarch

Middlemarch
Ranked number one in a 2015 BBC poll of the 100 greatest British novels. More

Early Offices

Westbow
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

Ursula Nordstrom

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