Tag: Expanding literature

Collins Operations during WWII

The 1940 destruction of the Collins Bridewell Place offices.
Collins maintained combined office and warehouse space at Bridewell Place in London for many years, and in 1917, its new London publishing office at 48 Pall Mall was complemented by printing works in Mayfair that included a state-of-the-art bindery, warehouse, and distribution center. 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

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

An Armed Services Edition of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith (1943).
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

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

Thomas Nelson: The Beginning

Title page of the Thomas Nelson edition of the Adventures of Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe (1860).
In 1800, an upstart 20-year-old printer named Thomas Neilson (who later changed his name to Nelson) set off a firestorm of controversy throughout the Scottish publishing world by offering something never before seen in Great Britain: classic books produced and printed for “the common man.” 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

Dan Harris

I used to read to lead a lot of fiction, mostly for the escape—to be transported to other places and times. More
Dan Harris

Dan Harris

Social Change: Women Writers

Author Catharine M. Sedgwick (1832).
In the mid-late 1800s, Harper & Brothers reprinted several milestone titles in the history of British feminist literature as well as the global canon, such as Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847), Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), and Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848), as well as George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1872). More

William Collins

Charles Chalmers and Rev. Thomas Chalmers.
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