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
Children’s books explored uncharted territory in the mid-1960s as Harper & Row began to champion boundary-pushing children’s and young adult books. More
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 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
John Gray’s Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus is published and becomes one of the bestselling nonfiction books of the 1990s, launching an era of gender and relationship dialogue. More
With corruption rampant in New York City politics, the newly formed American Republican Party convinced James Harper, one of the brothers who had founded J. & J. Harper in 1817, to run for mayor. More
Thomas Nelson Jr. perfects the rotary press, one of the greatest technological advances in printing since Johannes Gutenberg’s development of movable type in the fifteenth century. More
The efforts of one man in the mid-1950s brought about the publication of the New International Version of the Bible, a contemporary English translation that provided an accurate and understandable alternative to the King James Version, which had been the dominant translation for centuries. 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
The I Can Read! series launches with the publication of Little Bear, written by Else Holmelund Minarik and illustrated by Maurice Sendak, and becomes the number one beginning reader series in the United States. 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
HarperCollins expands from a primarily English-language publisher to one publishing in 17 languages, with operations in 18 countries around the world. More
In the mid-1970s Bible publisher Thomas Nelson found itself with extra capital and decided to channel these profits into the New King James Version of the Bible. More
William Collins introduces new steam presses, allowing Collins and Sons to publish Shakespeare and The Pilgrim’s Progress in affordable editions available to the masses. More
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
Signed with a paw print, this letter from “Padington” (circa 1966) was sent to Australian booksellers and sales staff, encouraging them to sell the latest Paddington title. More
Lawrence Heisey, a former soap salesman who had been appointed president of Harlequin in 1971, revolutionized romance publishing by distributing Harlequin romances to supermarkets and department stores, where they would be right at the fingertips of Canadian and American homemakers. More