Harper’s New Monthly Magazine launches in June, serializing Charles Dickens’s Bleak House, as well as then unknown authors Herman Melville and Mark Twain. More
William Collins and Sons secures the rights to Soviet dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago, an eye-opening work that exposes in startling detail the horrors of the communist regime in Russia. 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
Thomas Nelson commissions 130 scholars, pastors, and lay Christians to create the New King James Version (NKJV) of the Bible, aiming to “retain the purity and stylistic beauty” of the original King James produced in 1611. More
During a time of expansion for Collins in New Zealand, the company obtains New Zealand Post Office Box #1 (which it continues to use to this day) and moves to a new building on Wyndham Street, which at eight stories high, was then Auckland’s tallest building. More
To launch the new Canadian trade paperback imprint Totem, in September 1975, Collins Canada’s head of publicity Lucinda Vardey organized the release of hot air balloons over Toronto and neighboring suburbs. More
Stella Miles Franklin submitted this letter along with the manuscript of her first novel, My Brilliant Career, to Angus & Robertson in Australia, in March 1899, when she was just nineteen years old. More
Betty Smith’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, a story about growing up poor in turn-of-the-century Brooklyn, shines a light on first- and second-generation Americans living in poverty. More
HarperCollins Publishers began as J. & J. Harper, a small family printing shop run by brothers James and John Harper in New York City in March 1817. More
The Harper Prize Novel is introduced as a competition to discover unknown authors, and receives more than 700 submissions in its first year. The first winner, The Able McLaughlins by Margaret Wilson, is later awarded the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel (1924). More
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
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
Thomas Nelson introduces the Royal Readers and Royal School series in response to the enactment of compulsory schooling laws and increased demand for instructional books. 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 Western Union telegram dated September 14, 1967, from Cass Canfield Jr. (an editor at Harper) to Carmen Balcells (the agent of Gabriel García Márquez)... More
By 1844, Thomas Nelson’s company had grown large enough to open an office in London, under the leadership of Thomas Nelson Jr. and William Nelson. More
Harper & Brothers publishes the first American editions of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, and Anne Brontë's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. 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
In the early 1800s, American publishers were notorious for reprinting titles from overseas at a fraction of the price, and without payment to authors. More