William Collins, Sons

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  William Collins, Sons began with a Presbyterian schoolmaster and a borrowed idea. In 1819, William Collins founded a printing and publishing company in Glasgow, partnering with Charles Chalmers, the younger brother of Thomas Chalmers, the minister of Tron Church. The firm that grew from that modest partnership would go on to publish Agatha Christie, George Orwell, and Dr. Seuss, forge the New Naturalist nature series, and eventually merge into one of the largest publishers on earth. How did a Scottish religious press built on schoolbooks and Bibles become the home of detective fiction, wartime morale campaigns, and children's paperbacks? The story moves through Glasgow's Townhead district, into the Golden Age of crime writing, and across two centuries of English-language books.

• 2. Glasgow Beginnings

  ›

  Charles Chalmers left the business in 1825, just six years after the partnership was struck, leaving Collins to navigate the firm's early obstacles alone. The company pressed on, and in 1824 it published its first dictionary, the Greek and English Lexicon. By 1841, Collins had become established as a printer of Bibles, a distinction that shaped its identity for the next generation.

  The Sixpenny Pocket Pronouncing Dictionary appeared in 1840 as part of the first series of Collins Illustrated Dictionaries. It sold approximately one million copies, a figure that demonstrated the appetite Collins could satisfy when it aimed at the everyday reader. The company's first atlas followed in 1856, extending its reach beyond scripture and vocabulary.

  In 1846, William Collins retired and handed control to his son, Sir William Collins. Two years later, in 1848, the firm deepened its commitment to religious and educational publishing as a deliberate specialisation. The company was formally renamed William Collins, Sons and Co. Ltd. in 1868, anchoring the family name to a recognisable corporate identity that would carry forward into the twentieth century.

• 3. The Crime Club and Christie

  ›

  Sir Godfrey Collins was in charge when the firm began publishing fiction in 1917, marking the first major departure from the company's religious and educational roots. The move proved prescient. Collins Crime Club launched in 1930 and ran until 1994, spanning more than six decades and becoming one of the most consequential crime imprints in British publishing history.

  Agatha Christie's relationship with the Crime Club was defining. The imprint published all but the first six of her novels, starting in 1926. That long run placed Collins at the centre of the Golden Age of Detective Fiction, alongside the British editions of Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe books and many other titles from that era.

  Collins also acquired the rights to the works of C. S. Lewis and established Fount as its religion imprint to house them. The move showed an instinct for pairing an author's existing reputation with a dedicated imprint, a strategy Collins would return to across many genres. The Crime Club's closure in 1994 marked the end of one of British publishing's most enduring specialist ventures.

• 4. Wartime and Nature

  ›

  Between 1941 and 1949, Collins published Britain in Pictures, a series of social history books designed to boost morale during the Second World War. The contributors included George Orwell, John Piper, Neville Cardus, Cecil Beaton, Vita Sackville-West, David Low, Francis Meynell, Edith Sitwell, Graham Greene, and John Betjeman. That roster drew together writers, artists, and critics in a common patriotic project under a single Collins imprint.

  In 1945, while the war was still running, Collins founded the New Naturalist series of nature books focused on the British Isles. The inaugural volume was Butterflies by E. B. Ford. The series ran long enough that three new volumes appeared in the summer of 2015, more than seventy years after its launch. Few publishing series of any era have sustained that kind of continuity.

• 5. Imprints and Expansion

  ›

  Fontana Books launched in 1953, and in time grew beyond a simple series into a full Collins imprint with its own sub-series. These included the Fontana Monarchs, the Fontana African Fiction series, and from 1970 the Fontana Modern Masters, a series of pocket guides to influential writers, philosophers, and other thinkers of the twentieth century. Fontana Lions and Fontana Young Lions extended the imprint into books for children and teenagers.

  In 1965, Collins began publishing The Companion Guides, a series of illustrated travel guides covering France, the Mediterranean lands, and the British Isles. The Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew series from the United States came to Collins in the late 1970s, first published as digest-size hardbacks and then as paperbacks through the Armada Books imprint. Armada also carried the Three Investigators series alongside British stalwarts including Biggles, Billy Bunter, and Paddington Bear, and authors such as Enid Blyton, Malcolm Saville, and Diana Pullein-Thompson.

  Collins's range of juvenile publishing extended to Dr. Seuss titles for Commonwealth markets in the 1950s and to the work of Racey Helps. Grafton Books was another imprint operating under the company's umbrella. The 1983 acquisition of Granada's publishing operations further widened Collins's catalogue and production capacity.

• 6. Glasgow's Legacy Sites

  ›

  In the mid-1970s, Collins moved all of its operations out of the Townhead area of Glasgow, transferring to a new factory in Bishopbriggs. The University of Strathclyde purchased the land and buildings of the old site and demolished much of it. Two structures survived. The Montgomery Building, an office block constructed in 1953, became the Lord Hope Building. The large warehouse at the corner of Cathedral Street and St James's Road is now the Curran Building and Andersonian Library. The building at 181 St James's Road was also retained by the university and is used as a workshop and base for the Estates Management group.

  The Townhead departure marked the end of Collins's physical presence in the city where William Collins had founded the firm more than a century and a half earlier. The Bishopbriggs factory continued operations until the company's final transformation into a unit of a global media corporation.

• 7. The Road to HarperCollins

  ›

  News Corporation acquired a 40% stake in Collins in 1981. Two years later, in 1983, Collins purchased the publishing operations of Granada. News Corporation became the sole owner in 1989, completing the consolidation that had begun earlier that decade. In 1990, Collins merged with the American publisher Harper & Row, and the resulting company was named HarperCollins. Collins became an imprint within the new organisation rather than a standalone publisher.

  On the 8th of February 2013, it was announced that parts of the Collins non-fiction imprint would merge with the HarperPress imprint to create a new William Collins imprint, keeping the founder's name alive inside the structure that had absorbed the original firm. Collins Education, meanwhile, operates as the third-largest educational publishing house in the United Kingdom. In 2010, it acquired Belair Creative, Letts and Lonsdale, and Leckie & Leckie. In 2011, Collins Education launched Collins Online Learning, an online platform for students and teachers, extending into digital delivery the educational mission that Charles Chalmers and William Collins had first committed to on paper in 1819.