HarperCollins is a publishing company owned by 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 Brian Murray. The company publishes under many different imprints. The Collins dictionary is an example of an abridged dictionary.

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, specializing 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.

Collins ultimately became a diverse and prolific publisher, publishing a wide range of titles, including many aimed at a juvenile audience. By the late 1970s, Wm Collins & Sons was also responsible for publishing the long-running American Children's Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew series' in the United Kingdom. These were firstly published in a series of digest size hardbacks akin to their American style. Paperbacks (of a 'normal' rather than 'digest' size) soon followed from Collins' Armada Books imprint, although the series as published in England follow a different numbering system to the accepted American one. Collins's Armada Books imprint also published similar series, such as the Three Investigators, alongside such British stallwarts as Biggles, Billy Bunter and Paddington Bear, and such well-loved authors as Enid Blyton, Malcolm Saville, Diana Pullein-Thompson.

HarperCollins Children's Books has a long tradition in the industry, and has one of the best backlists in the business. This 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 (illustrated by Maurice Sendak). 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 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, then went on to become the company's first female vice president. Finally, she had her own imprint, CZ Books.