HarperCollins
- (en)
HarperCollins is a publishing company owned by Rupert Murdoch's News
Corporation. It is the combination of the publishers William Collins, Sons
and Co Ltd, a British company, and Harper & Row, an American company.
The worldwide CEO of HarperCollins is Jane Friedman. The company publishes
under many different imprints.
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 and Co Ltd. in 1868.
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 and Co Ltd. 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 Quimby, Harold and the Purple Crayon, and
scores more. In 1998, Nordtrom's personal correspondence was brought out
in Dear Genius: The Letters of Ursula Nordstrom. The writer Charlotte
Zolotow, who began her career as a stenographer to Nordstrom, became her
protege, and went on to write more than 80 books of her own (including
those of , as well as to edit hundreds of others, including Nordstrom's
own book, The Secret Language, and those of Paul Fleischman. Zolotow was
later made the children's book department head, and then went on to become
the company's first female vice president. Finally, she had her own
imprint, CZ Books.
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.
In 2003, Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollins, published Edith Grossman's new
translation of Cervantes's Don Quixote, to great acclaim.
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.
Its web site home page describes it as "Home of William Morrow, Avon,
Perennial, Rayo, Amistad, Caedmon Audio, Regan Books".
