The Zondervan brothers

Bernie and Pat Zondervan (founders of religious publishing firm Zondervan) in their first store in Grand Rapids in 1933, shortly before they began publishing books. More

1972: Avon launches the historical romance genre…

Avon launches the historical romance genre when it publishes Kathleen Woodiwiss’s The Flame and the Flower, a historical romance with a strong female lead and sexual situations that go a step beyond the tame romances of earlier eras. More

Incidents of Travel in Yucatán

In 1839, American diplomat John Lloyd Stephens and British artist Frederick Catherwood—both already celebrated for their adventures in Egypt, the Holy Land, Greece, and Rome—sailed together out of New York harbor on an expedition into the forbidding rain forests of present-day Honduras, Guatemala, and Mexico. More

Doctor Zhivago

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

Social Change: Women Writers

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

Social Change: Thomas Nast, Illustrator

Illustrator Thomas Nast first made his name documenting the Civil War in all its gruesome reality, but he is best known for developing the political cartoon form and our modern depictions of Santa Claus. More

I Can Read!

Inspired by an occasion in which she attempted to find an appropriate book for a young boy who had just learned to read, Boston librarian Virginia Haviland telephoned her friend Ursula Nordstrom, the head of children’s publishing at Harper & Brothers. More