Harlequin Mills & Boon was the 1994 to 2010 company name of the London romance publisher Mills & Boon, then owned by Harlequin, which issued numbered series romance paperbacks.
Harlequin Mills & Boon is a publisher active from 1968. We track 466 editions it published between 1968 and 2021, 2 of them first editions across 459 books. How Harlequin Mills & Boon marked its first editions is set out below, with a checker for the year on your title page.
About Harlequin Mills & Boon
Harlequin Mills & Boon was the company name carried by the British romance publisher Mills & Boon between 1994 and 2010, while it was the UK arm of the Canadian romance house Harlequin.
Mills & Boon was started in 1908 by Gerald Rusgrove Mills and Charles Boon, who had both worked at Methuen. It began as a general fiction house, and its early list included adventure stories by Jack London and two early novels by Hugh Walpole. In the 1930s it concentrated on romance, selling hardbacks to the cheap lending libraries that had multiplied between the wars; their bindings earned them the nickname "the brown books". Paperbacks followed in the 1960s.
Harlequin took the North American rights to Mills & Boon romances in the late 1950s (sources give 1957 or 1958) and bought the firm outright on 1 October 1971. UK company records show Mills & Boon Limited renamed Harlequin Mills & Boon Limited on 8 August 1994 and Harlequin (UK) Limited on 17 November 2010.
Torstar took a majority stake in Harlequin in the 1970s and the rest in 1981, then sold the business to News Corp in 2014; Harlequin is now a division of HarperCollins, and the UK company's registered office is The News Building at London Bridge. Its numbered series lines include Modern, Medical, Historical and Desire.
Holding a copy? The first edition checker shows Harlequin Mills & Boon's practice for the year on your title page.
Identification
How to identify Harlequin Mills & Boon first editions
What to look for
What a collector should know first: under this name the house was a mass producer of numbered category romance paperbacks, issued in monthly batches by series line. Few of these books are collected as first editions; interest centres on particular authors and early series numbers.
Before 1994
1994 to 2010
Most titles appeared as numbered paperbacks within a series line; a paperback that comes before any hardback counts as the true first.
The same novel was commonly issued in several markets under different series names and numbers, for example as a UK Mills & Boon Desire number and a different US Silhouette Desire number, and Australian printings also exist. Note the country and series number, since a copy from another market is a reprint of the same text rather than a variant of the first.
How do I identify a Harlequin Mills & Boon first edition?
What a collector should know first: under this name the house was a mass producer of numbered category romance paperbacks, issued in monthly batches by series line. Few of these books are collected as first editions; interest centres on particular authors and early series numbers. Before 1994 1994 to 2010 - Most titles appeared as numbered paperbacks within a series line; a paperback that comes be
How many Harlequin Mills & Boon books does MyVolumes track?
We track 466 editions published by Harlequin Mills & Boon, 2 of them first editions, across 459 books.
