Harper (publisher)

• 1. Introduction

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  Harper is one of the oldest continuously operating publishing houses in the United States, tracing its roots to a print shop opened in New York City in 1817. Two brothers with ink on their hands and ambition in their plans set something in motion that would eventually put books by Herman Melville, Mark Twain, and Harper Lee into the hands of readers around the world. How did a family printing business survive wars, mergers, ownership changes, and more than two centuries of shifting tastes? And what does it mean that the name on the door today is still, essentially, the same name those brothers first carved out above their shop? Those are the questions this story will answer.

• 2. The Brothers and Their Press

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  James Harper and his brother John were trained as printers before they were publishers. They opened J. & J. Harper in New York City in 1817, building the business on craft as much as commerce. Their two younger brothers, Joseph Wesley and Fletcher, joined the firm in the mid-1820s, turning a two-man shop into a family operation. By 1833, that family presence was significant enough that the company changed its name to Harper & Brothers, a title that would endure for nearly 130 years. The headquarters settled at 331 Pearl Street, facing Franklin Square in Lower Manhattan, within sight of the Manhattan approach to what would become the Brooklyn Bridge. The address placed them in the thick of the city's commercial life at a moment when New York was rapidly becoming the center of American print culture.

• 3. Magazines and Periodicals

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  Harper's New Monthly Magazine launched in New York City in 1850, making the firm a force in American periodical publishing as well as books. Harper's Weekly followed in June 1857, and Harper's Bazar began on the 2nd of November 1867, with Harper's Young People added in 1879. Each publication carved out its own audience. Harper's Bazar was sold to William Randolph Hearst in 1913 and eventually became Harper's Bazaar, now published by the Hearst Corporation simply as Bazaar. Harper's Weekly was absorbed by The Independent in 1916, and that publication later merged with The Outlook in 1928. Harper's New Monthly Magazine outlasted them both, eventually becoming Harper's Magazine and continuing under the Harper's Magazine Foundation.

• 4. The Editors Who Shaped the List

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  Cass Canfield joined Harper & Brothers in 1924 and held executive positions there until his death in 1986, a tenure of more than six decades that gave him unusual influence over the company's direction. Eugene F. Saxton arrived in 1925 as an editor and built a roster that included Edna St. Vincent Millay and Thornton Wilder. Edward Aswell joined in 1935 as an assistant editor of general books and eventually rose to editor-in-chief. Aswell persuaded Thomas Wolfe to leave his previous publisher, Scribner's, and after Wolfe died, Aswell edited the posthumous novels The Web and the Rock, You Can't Go Home Again, and The Hills Beyond. George B. M. Harvey had become president of Harper's on the 16th of November 1899, presiding over the house during an earlier era of expansion. The catalogue these figures assembled over the decades grew to include writers from Herman Melville and Mark Twain to Agatha Christie, Aldous Huxley, Arthur Conan Doyle, and E. B. White.

• 5. Merger, Acquisition, and New Names

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  In 1962, Harper & Brothers merged with Row, Peterson and Company to become Harper & Row, a name that held for nearly three decades. The firm acquired Thomas Y. Crowell Co. and J. B. Lippincott and Co. in the 1970s, folding Crowell and the trade operations of Lippincott into Harper & Row in 1980. The religious publishing arm moved to San Francisco in 1977, becoming Harper San Francisco and later HarperOne. In 1988, Harper & Row purchased the religious publisher Zondervan, including its subsidiary Marshall Pickering. Then, in 1987, Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation acquired Harper & Row outright. Three years later, News Corporation purchased William Collins, Sons, the British publishing house, and combined the two under a single name. The Harper torch icon and the Collins fountain icon merged to form HarperCollins in 1990, uniting the American and British operations into a global publisher.

• 6. The Name Returns

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  After 1990, the Harper name receded inside the larger HarperCollins identity, but it did not disappear. In 2007, the Harper imprint began appearing in place of HarperCollins on a range of titles, restoring the founding family's name to the cover nearly two centuries after James and John first hung out a shingle on Pearl Street. The mass-market paperback line that launched after the News Corporation purchase had moved through several names of its own: Harper Paperbacks from 1990 to 2000, then HarperTorch from 2000 to 2006, before settling on Harper from 2007 onward. Among the authors whose work has appeared under the Harper name in recent decades are Paulo Coelho, Barbara Kingsolver, Martin Luther King Jr., Maurice Sendak, Shel Silverstein, and Laura Ingalls Wilder, a list that reflects the breadth the house accumulated across its long history.