Publisher
Avon Books (Mm)
Avon Books is a New York paperback publisher founded in 1941, owned by Hearst from 1959 and by HarperCollins since 1999, known for helping launch the modern romance novel with The Flame and the Flower in 1972.
- Editions tracked
- 17
- First editions
- 15
- Books
- 17
- Years
- 1980 to 1997
About Avon Books (Mm)
Avon Books is an American paperback publisher, founded in New York in 1941, that is best known today as the romance imprint of HarperCollins.
The American News Company set Avon up to compete with Pocket Books, hiring the siblings Joseph Myers and Edna Myers Williams to run it, and the new firm grew out of J. S. Ogilvie Publications, an older publisher of cheap fiction. Its early output was broad popular fare: ghost stories, fantasy, science fiction and digest-format paperbacks, and from about 1945 to the mid-1950s a line of comic books. By 1953 it was selling more than 20 million books a year.
The Hearst Corporation bought Avon in 1959. In 1972 it published Kathleen E. Woodiwiss's The Flame and the Flower as an original paperback rather than a hardback reprint; it sold 2.35 million copies and helped launch the modern romance genre. Woodiwiss's The Wolf and the Dove and Rosemary Rogers's Sweet Savage Love and Dark Fires followed in 1974. Later Avon romance authors include Johanna Lindsey, Lisa Kleypas, Julia Quinn and Eloisa James.
In 1999 News Corporation bought Hearst's book division and folded Avon into HarperCollins. Its hardback and non-romance lines moved to William Morrow, leaving Avon as a romance specialist, with later imprints such as the erotica line Avon Red, launched in 2006.
Holding a copy? The first edition checker shows Avon Books (Mm)'s practice for the year on your title page.
Identification
How to identify Avon Books (Mm) first editions
Authors
Series
Books
Published by Avon Books (Mm)
Frequently asked questions
How do I identify an Avon Books (Mm) first edition?
How many Avon Books (Mm) books does MyVolumes track?
We track 17 editions published by Avon Books (Mm), 15 of them first editions, across 17 books.
Where these facts come from
- Avon (publisher), Wikipedia (en.wikipedia.org)
- Avon, Romance Wiki (University of Birmingham), 2011 (romancewiki.bham.ac.uk)
- Avon, Sweet Savage Flame (sweetsavageflame.com)
- The Complete Runner, ISBN 9780380018857 listings, AbeBooks (abebooks.com)
Every fact on this page was checked against the sources listed. Checked 21 October 2026. Reviewed by Harriet Ellis; read how we check facts.