HarperCollins
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
HarperCollins is a publishing organization owned by News Corporation. It is the combination of the publishers William Collins, Sons & Co, a British company, and Harper & Row, an American company. The worldwide CEO of HarperCollins is Jane Friedman. The company publishes under many different imprints.
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[edit] History
Collins was a Scottish printing company founded by a Presbyterian schoolmaster, William Collins, in Glasgow in 1819, in partnership with Charles Chalmers, the younger brother of Thomas Chalmers, minister of Tron Church, Glasgow. The company had to overcome many early obstacles, and Charles Chalmers left the business in 1825. The company eventually found success in 1841 as a printer of Bibles, and in 1848 Collins's son Sir William Collins developed the firm as a publishing venture, specialising in religious and educational books. The company was renamed William Collins, Sons & Co. in 1868. [1]
Although the early emphasis of the company had been on religion and education, Collins also published more widely. In 1917, with Sir Godfrey Collins in charge, the firm started publishing fiction. William Collins, Sons & Co. published all but the first six of Agatha Christie's novels. Upon purchasing the rights to the works of C.S. Lewis, Fount was established as Collins's religion imprint.
HarperCollins Children's Books has a long tradition in the industry, and has one of the best backlists in the business. The is largely due to legendary children's book editor Ursula Nordstrom, who was the director of Harper's Department of Books for Boys and Girls from 1940 to 1973. She personally brought out such classics of children's literature as Goodnight Moon, Where the Wild Things Are, The Giving Tree, Charlotte's Web, Beverly Cleary's series starring Ramona, Harold and the Purple Crayon, and scores more. [2] In 1998, Nordtrom's personal correspondence was brought out in Dear Genius: The Letters of Ursula Nordstrom. Today, the HarperCollins children's division publishes bestsellers from Lemony Snicket, Neil Gaiman, and Jamie Lee Curtis.
In 1989 Collins was bought by Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation. Joined together with the New York-based publisher Harper & Row in 1987, they now trade under the name HarperCollins.
Collins is still used as an imprint, chiefly for wildlife and natural history books (including the on-going New Naturalist series) and field guides, as well as English and bilingual dictionaries based on the Bank of English, a large corpus of contemporary English texts.
In 1999, News Corporation purchased the Hearst Book Group consisting of William Morrow & Company and Avon Books. [1]
Its web site home page describes it as "Home of William Morrow, Avon, Perennial, Rayo, Amistad, Caedmon Audio, Regan Books".
Among HarperCollins' specialty books it also sells the Satanic Bible.
[edit] Imprints
- Amistad
- Avon Books
- Avon Red
- Avon Trade
- Caedmon
- Collins
- Collins Design
- Ecco Press
- Eos
- HarperCollinsChildren'sBooks
- Harper Paperbacks
- Harper Perennial
- Harper Perennial Modern Classics
- HarperAudio
- HarperCollins
- HarperCollins e-Books
- HarperEntertainment
- HarperLargePrint
- HarperSanFrancisco
- HarperTorch
- Morrow Cookbooks
- Rayo
- ReganBooks
- William Morrow & Company
- Zondervan
[edit] See also
- COBUILD - a research facility set up by Collins in conjunction with the University of Birmingham.
[edit] References
- ^ Keir, David (1952). The House of Collins: The Story of a Scottish Family of Publishers from 1789 to the Present Day. Collins: London. ISBN B00005XH0X.
- ^ Marcus, Leonard S (editor) (1998). Dear Genius: The Letters of Ursula Nordstrom HarperTrophy: New York. ISBN: 0064462358
