HarperCollins - Definition and Overview

Collins was a Scottish printing company founded by a schoolmaster, William Collins, in Glasgow in 1819. In 1848, when his son Sir William Collins became a partner in the business, they became a publishing company, specialising in religious and educational books. The company was renamed William Collins, Sons & Co. in 1868.

In 1917, with Sir Godfrey Collins in charge, Collins started publishing fiction. William Collins, Sons & Co. published all but the first six of Agatha Christie's novels.

In 1989 Collins was taken over by Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation. Joined together with the US publisher Harper & Row, they now trade under the name HarperCollins.

Collins is still used as an imprint, chiefly for wildlife and natural history books (including the on-going New Naturalist series) and field guides, as well as English and bilingual dictionaries based on the Bank of English, a large corpus of contemporary English texts.

See also

• COBUILD - a research facility set up by Collins in conjunction with the University of Birmingham.