From Clerk to Chairman of the Board

One summer day in 1884, Horatio Harper, grandson of founder John Harper, began talking with a bright young boy during his regular steamboat commute from Long Island to Manhattan. More

The Pre-Packaged Library

The Harper brothers created collections of titles that allowed readers to amass an entire library instead of buying just a single book. More

The HarperCollins Logo

The HarperCollins logo represents the 1990 consolidation of Harper & Row, based in New York, and Collins Publishers, based in London and Glasgow. More

Science Fiction & Fantasy

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

Bleak House

Dickens’s tenth novel, often considered his finest; significantly influenced the development of mystery novels. More

Ben-Hur

Lew Wallace, a Union general in the Civil War, wrote the biblical novel Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ in 1880. More

Profiles in Courage

Harper & Brothers helped groom the image of a future president when it agreed in the mid-1950s to work with a young senator on a collection of biographical sketches about courageous American lawmakers. More

Brave New World

Huxley’s best-known novel; a prophetic classic of speculative fiction that continues to resonate. More

“The Most Beautiful Printing Ever Done”

James Harper went to Europe in 1835 to compile a set of fairy tales for publication, and Harper & Brothers enlisted Joseph A. Adams to make 81 detailed wood-cut engravings for the collection. More

The Woman in White

One of the earliest works of detective fiction, this story caused a sensation with readers at the time. More

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

The Steam-Powered Press

For years, the Harper brothers relied on a white draft horse named Dobbin, who plodded a circular path in the basement of their offices, turning a wooden shaft that powered the Treadwell hand press two floors above, until new technology sent him out to pasture. More

Jane Eyre

Brontë’s masterpiece of Gothic romance; a milestone title in the history of British feminist literature. More

Social Change: Civil Rights

Beginning with This Is My Story (1937), Harper & Brothers published many works by Eleanor Roosevelt that promoted civil rights and the need for government action, including This I Remember (1949), On My Own (1958), and Tomorrow Is Now (1963). More