William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist becomes the first horror story to reach number one on the New York Times bestseller list and helps initiate the modern horror film movement. More
In this photograph, Charles H. Sweeny, Editorial and Production, F. F. Appleton, publisher (center), and Margaret V. Paull, staff artist and typographer, plan the first Canadian production of Little Grey Rabbit Books. More
In 1952, Barbara Cohen and Marianne Roney, a pair of recent college graduates, wrote a letter to Welsh poet Dylan Thomas that contained an unusual business proposal. More
A copy of the first book ever published by Mills & Boon, Arrows from the Dark by Sophie Cole (1909), signed by Messrs. Gerald Mills and Charles Boon. More
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
Although word-processing programs and electronic typewriters had been around since the late 1960s, Harper & Row was the first to help pioneer electronic publishing with Andrew Garve’s The Long Short Cut in 1968, which was, according to the New York Times, “the first book set into type completely by electronic composition.” More
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
At the turn of the century, William Collins III combined innovative packaging and distribution with innovative aesthetics by creating shilling-priced illustrated paperbacks. More
The Harper offices in New York City were claimed by fire in 1853, when a plumber lit a lamp with a roll of paper and then attempted to extinguish the burning roll in a tub of water. More
The Harper brothers first began publishing in the early 1800s, when emerging technologies were fundamentally changing the process of printing–replacing the painstaking compositing, inking, and pulling processes needed for each page. More