Harlequin

About Harlequin

Harlequin is a Canadian publisher of mass-market romance fiction, founded in Winnipeg in 1949 and now a division of HarperCollins.

Richard Bonnycastle, Jack Palmer and Doug Weld started the company to reprint other publishers' books as cheap paperbacks. Its first title was Nancy Bruff's The Manatee (May 1949), and the early list mixed westerns, mysteries, romance and non-fiction, and its reprints included books by Agatha Christie and Arthur Conan Doyle; the Christie titles appeared between 1953 and 1958.

In 1957 Harlequin began distributing the British firm Mills & Boon's romances in North America, and by 1964 it was publishing only Mills & Boon titles under the Harlequin name. It moved to Toronto in 1969 and bought Mills & Boon outright in 1971.

Torstar took a majority stake in 1975 and full ownership in 1981, and sold Harlequin to News Corp in 2014, since when it has sat within HarperCollins. Its current series lines include Harlequin Romance, Presents, Desire, Intrigue and Special Edition (Desire and Special Edition came with Silhouette, bought from Simon & Schuster in 1984), and it also runs imprints such as MIRA and Love Inspired. Janet Dailey became the first American author it put under contract, in late 1975, and Anne Mather and Violet Winspear were among the prolific writers used to promote Harlequin Presents.

How to spot a Harlequin first edition