HarperCollins Publishers LLC is one of the world's largest publishing companies. Headquartered in New York City, the company is a subsidiary of News Corporation. The company name is a combination of Harper & Row - an American publishing company acquired in 1987, itself the result of an earlier merger of Harper & Brothers (founded 1817) and Row, Peterson & Company - and UK publishing company William Collins, Sons (founded 1819), acquired in 1990. The worldwide CEO of HarperCollins is Brian Murray.[1] HarperCollins has publishing groups in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, and India. The company publishes many different imprints, both former independent publishing houses and new imprints.

History
 

HarperCollins UK headquarters in Hammersmith, London

In 1989, Collins was bought by Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation, and the publisher was combined with Harper & Row, which NewsCorp had acquired two years earlier. In addition to the simplified and merged name, the logo for HarperCollins was derived from the torch logo for Harper and Row, and the fountain logo for Collins, which were combined into a stylized set of flames atop waves.

In 1999, News Corporation purchased the Hearst Book Group, consisting of William Morrow & Company and Avon Books. These imprints are now published under the rubric of HarperCollins.

HarperCollins bought educational publisher Letts and Lonsdale in March 2010.

In 2011, HarperCollins announced they had agreed to acquire the publisher Thomas Nelson.[3] The purchase was completed on July 11, 2012 with an announcement that Thomas Nelson would operate independently given the position it has in Christian book publishing.[4]

Management history
Jane Friedman was CEO for HarperCollins from 1997 to 2008. Notable management figures include Lisa Sharkey, current senior vice president and director of creative development and Barry Winkleman from 1989 to 1994.

U.S. warehousing closings
It was announced to employees privately and then later in the day publicly on Monday, November 5, 2012 that HarperCollins is closing its remaining 2 U.S. warehouses, in order to merge shipping and warehousing operations with R.R. Donnelley in Indiana. The Scranton, PA warehouse will close in September 2013 and a Nashville, TN warehouse, under the name (D.B.A.) Thomas Nelson (which distributes the religious arm of HarperCollins/Zondervan Books), in winter of 2013. Several office positions and departments will continue to work for HarperCollins in Scranton, but in a new location.[5]

The Scranton warehouse closing will eliminate approximately 200 jobs, and the Nashville warehouse closing will eliminate up to 500 jobs (exact number of distribution employees is unknown).

HarperCollins previously closed 2 U.S. warehouses, one in Williamsport, PA in 2011 and another in Grand Rapids, MI in 2012.[7] “We have taken a long-term, global view of our print distribution and are committed to offering the broadest possible reach for our authors," said HarperCollins Chief Executive Brian Murray, according to Publishers Weekly."We are retooling the traditional distribution model to ensure we can competitively offer the entire HarperCollins catalog to customers regardless of location.” Company officials attribute the closings and mergers to the rapidly growing demand for e-book formats and the decline in print purchasing.

Harper Children's Books
Children's book editor Ursula Nordstrom was the director of Harper's Department of Books for Boys and Girls from 1940 to 1973, overseeing the publication of classics such as Goodnight Moon, Where the Wild Things Are, The Giving Tree, Charlotte's Web, Beverly Cleary's series starring Ramona Quimby, and Harold and the Purple Crayon. They were the publishing home of Maurice Sendak, Shel Silverstein, and Margaret Wise Brown.[9] In 1998, Nordstrom's personal correspondence was published as Dear Genius: The Letters of Ursula Nordstrom (illustrated by Maurice Sendak), edited by Charlotte Zolotow. Zolotow began her career as a stenographer to Nordstrom, became her protege, and went on to write more than 80 books and edit hundreds of others, including Nordstrom's The Secret Language and the works of Paul Fleischman. Zolotow later became head of the Children's Books Department, and went on to become the company's first female Vice-President.

Imprints
HarperCollins has over 30 book imprints, most of which are based in the United States.[10] Collins still exists as an imprint, chiefly for wildlife and natural history books, field guides, as well as English and bilingual dictionaries based on the Bank of English, a large corpus of contemporary English texts.

On 8 February 2013 it was announced that some parts of the Collins non-fiction imprint would be merged with the HarperPress imprint to form the new William Collins imprint.[11]

HarperCollins imprints (current and defunct, including imprints that existed prior to various mergers), include:

Current
• Amistad, primarily books of African American interest, named for the storied ship La Amistad
• Avon
o Avon Inspire
o Avon Red
o Avon Romance
• Balzer + Bray
• Broadside Books
• Caedmon, audiobooks
• Collins
• Ecco
• Fourth Estate
• Grafton Books
• Greenwillow Books, children's literature
• Harper
• Harper Audio
• Harper Business
• Harper Design
• Harper Festival
• Harper Paperbacks
• Harper Perennial, originally Perennial Library
• Harper Perennial Modern Classics
• HarperCollins Children's Audio
• HarperCollins Children's Books
• HarperCollins e-Books
• HarperCollins Speakers Bureau
• HarperLuxe
• HarperOne
• HarperTeen
• HarperVoyager, formerly Voyager, HarperCollins’s worldwide sf& fantasy imprint, combining the UK imprint

HarperCollins Science Fiction & Fantasy (which had inherited the sf& fantasy list of Collins’s Grafton Books and its predecessors (Granada, Panther), as well as J. R. R. Tolkien’s books from the acquisition of George Allen &Unwin) and the US imprint Eos (from the acquisition of Avon Books, which incorporated the former Harper Prism)

• It Books
• Mischief, all digital erotica imprint
• William Morrow
o Morrow Cookbooks, a highly respected series of cookbooks
• Katherine Tegen Books
• Rayo
• Thomas Nelson
• Walden Pond Press
• Zondervan

Defunct
• Unwin Hyman (defunct, once known as Allen &Unwin, which is now an independent publisher)
• Angus & Robertson
• The Julie Andrews Collection
• Avon A
• Blue Door
• Cliff Street Books
• Collins Press
• Collins Bartholomew, cartographic publisher
• Collins GEM
• Eos Books, science fiction/fantasy, formerly an Avon Books imprint
• Flamingo
• Fontana
• Harper & Brothers
• Harper & Row
• Harper Element
• Harper Perennial Modern Thought
• Harper Prism, science fiction imprint (merged with Eos)
• Harper San Francisco, with a focus on religious and spiritual books
• Harper Sport
• Harper Thorsons
• Harper Torch
• Harper Trophy, children's book imprint
• Harper True
• HarperCollins West
• Marshall Pickering
• Moonstone
• New Naturalist
• ReganBooks

HarperCollins
Parent company	News Corporation
Status	Active
Founded	1989
Country of origin	United Kingdom
Headquarters location	10 East 53rd Street New York City
Distribution	Worldwide
Imprints	Numerous
Official website	www.harpercollins.com