HarperCollins

• 1. A House Built From Mergers

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  HarperCollins traces its name to two companies that never met until one man decided to buy them both. James Harper and his brother John founded J & J Harper in New York in 1817. Two years later, in 1819, a Presbyterian schoolmaster named William Collins opened a printing shop in Glasgow. For more than a century and a half, the two firms grew on separate continents, built separate reputations, and served entirely different reading publics. Then Rupert Murdoch arrived.

  News Corporation acquired Harper & Row in March 1987 and picked up William Collins, Sons the same year, having already held a 40 percent stake in Collins since 1981. By 1989, News Corp merged the two houses into a single company. The name was a straight stitch: Harper from one side of the Atlantic, Collins from the other. The logo followed the same logic, fusing the flame from Harper's torch with the water from Collins' fountain. Today HarperCollins sits inside the "Big Five" English-language publishers, alongside Penguin Random House, Hachette, Macmillan, and Simon & Schuster, with headquarters in both London and New York City.

• 2. Harper's Long American Century

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  Harper & Brothers did not begin as a book publisher in the modern sense. James and John Harper started a printing operation, and the firm's four brothers, James, John, Joseph Wesley, and Fletcher, eventually gave the house the "Harper & Brothers" name it carried from 1833. The nineteenth century turned the company into a magazine empire. Harper's Magazine, Harper's Weekly, Harper's Bazaar, and Harper's Young People all originated under that roof before being sold or discontinued.

  The firm kept expanding through the twentieth century. Harper & Brothers merged with Row, Peterson & Company in 1962 to become Harper & Row. That new entity acquired Thomas Y. Crowell Co. and J. B. Lippincott & Co. in the 1970s, folding Crowell and the trade side of Lippincott into its operations by 1980. The religious publisher Zondervan, including its subsidiary Marshall Pickering, joined in 1988. Mark Twain, the Bronte sisters, and William Makepeace Thackeray all appeared on the Harper backlist, giving the house a literary pedigree that stretched across American literary history.

• 3. The Collins Side of the Ledger

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  William Collins built his Glasgow firm on religion and education before his descendants widened the catalogue. The significant turn into fiction came in 1917, under Godfrey Collins' leadership. That shift proved consequential. The Collins Crime Club imprint became a major force during the Golden Age of Detective Fiction, publishing novels by Agatha Christie and Rex Stout.

  The religious imprint Fount gave a home to C. S. Lewis. Collins also became the British Commonwealth publisher for The Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, and Dr. Seuss. In the 1950s, the "Collins Seagull Library" described its mission directly: "good school stories, adventure stories, and children's classics at a popular price." The children's literary tradition Collins built fed directly into what HarperCollins would later call its children's publishing strength. When News Corp folded Collins into the merged company, Collins continued as an imprint, primarily for wildlife, natural history, field guides, and dictionaries built on the Bank of English corpus.

• 4. Acquiring Everything in Sight

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  Brian Murray became president and chief executive of HarperCollins in 2008, succeeding Jane Friedman, who had held the role from 1997 to 2008. Under Murray's tenure, the acquisition pace accelerated. HarperCollins bought educational publisher Letts and Lonsdale in March 2010. In 2011 it announced the acquisition of Thomas Nelson, one of the dominant names in Christian publishing, completing the deal on the 11th of July 2012. Thomas Nelson and Zondervan were then folded under a new division called HarperCollins Christian Publishing.

  The Canadian romance publisher Harlequin Enterprises followed in 2014 for C$455 million. In 2018, business publisher Amacom came from the American Management Association. The children's side grew in 2020 when HarperCollins acquired Egmont Books UK, Egmont Poland, and Schneiderbuch Germany from the Egmont Group. On the 29th of March 2021, the company announced it would acquire HMH Books & Media, the trade publishing division of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, for $349 million. The deal closed on the 10th of May 2021. HMH's adult titles became Mariner Books and HMH's children's titles became Clarion Books as of the 7th of July 2021. HarperCollins now operates publishing groups in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, Brazil, India, and China.

• 5. Children's Books and Ursula Nordstrom

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  From 1940 to 1973, Ursula Nordstrom ran Harper's Department of Books for Boys and Girls. Under her watch, the house published Goodnight Moon, Where the Wild Things Are, The Giving Tree, Charlotte's Web, and Beverly Cleary's Ramona Quimby series. Maurice Sendak, Shel Silverstein, and Margaret Wise Brown were all published during her tenure.

  Nordstrom's influence extended through her protegees. Charlotte Zolotow started as her stenographer, became her apprentice, went on to write more than 80 books and edit hundreds of others, and eventually became the company's first female vice president. In 1998, Nordstrom's personal correspondence appeared as Dear Genius: The Letters of Ursula Nordstrom, illustrated by Maurice Sendak and edited by Zolotow. The children's division Nordstrom shaped is now one of the largest in publishing, with more than 120 imprints across the company and a catalogue running from the I Can Read! series to Divergent to A Series of Unfortunate Events.

• 6. Controversies and Labor

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  In 1998, HarperCollins became the center of an international controversy when it emerged that Rupert Murdoch had personally blocked publication of Chris Patten's book East and West. Patten was the last British governor of Hong Kong, and his book was critical of Chinese authorities. Stuart Proffitt, the editor who had worked on the manuscript, resigned from the company. The story suggested Murdoch had intervened to protect his business ambitions in China. Patten later published the book through Macmillan in America, where it carried the phrase "The book that Rupert Murdoch refused to publish." After a legal campaign, Patten published in the UK in September 1998, receiving a sum of £500,000 and an apology from Murdoch.

  In April 2012, the United States Department of Justice named HarperCollins among defendants in United States v. Apple Inc., alleging that publishers and Apple conspired to fix e-book prices and weaken Amazon's market position. A federal judge approved a settlement of those antitrust claims in December 2013, with HarperCollins and the other publishers paying into a fund for customers who had overpaid.

  On the 10th of November 2022, approximately 250 workers at HarperCollins represented by Local 2110 of the United Auto Workers began an indefinite strike after working without a contract since April of that year. Picketing paused on the 21st of December 2022 so workers could spend time with family, then resumed on the 3rd of January 2023. The union ratified a new contract on the 16th of February 2023. Under its terms, the annual starting salary rose from $45,000 to $47,500 upon ratification and was set to reach $50,000 by 2025. Full-time union employees received a lump-sum payment of $1,500, and workers earning less than $60,000 gained the right to claim two hours of overtime per week without manager approval. Workers returned to their duties on the 21st of February 2023.

• 7. A Catalogue and Its Reach

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  HarperCollins holds the publishing rights to J. R. R. Tolkien's work, acquired in 1990 when Unwin Hyman was bought. That backlist includes The Hobbit, originally published by George Allen & Unwin in 1937; The Lord of the Rings, published in 1954-1955; and The Silmarillion, which appeared in 1977. HarperCollins also holds Neil Gaiman's American Gods and Anansi Boys, Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall, and Paulo Coelho's The Alchemist, first published in Portuguese as O Alquimista in 1988.

  In November 2024, HarperCollins signed a licensing agreement with Microsoft to provide book content for training generative AI models, becoming the first major book publisher to do so. On the 16th of July 2025, the company announced it had acquired the French and German Crunchyroll manga publishing business, with that deal closing on the 30th of September 2025. In October 2025, Kate Elton was appointed UK and Ireland interim chief executive after Charlie Redmayne's resignation. The company that began with two brothers printing books in lower Manhattan now publishes across eight countries under more than 120 imprints.