Harlequin is a Canadian romance paperback house founded in Winnipeg in 1949 as a reprint publisher; its early books and its 1957 to 1970s Mills & Boon titles are reissues, not first editions.
Harlequin is a publisher based in Toronto, founded in 1949. We track 1,746 editions it published between 1959 and 2016, 2 of them first editions across 1,744 books. How Harlequin marked its first editions is set out below, with a checker for the year on your title page.
About Harlequin
Harlequin is a Canadian publisher of mass-market romance paperbacks, founded in Winnipeg in 1949 and now a division of HarperCollins.
Richard Bonnycastle, Jack Palmer and Doug Weld set the company up to buy reprint rights to existing novels and sell them as cheap paperbacks, partly to keep a printing works busy. The first title was Nancy Bruff's The Manatee (May 1949). The early list mixed westerns, mysteries, romance and non-fiction, mostly reprints of Agatha Christie, Arthur Conan Doyle, Somerset Maugham and James Hadley Chase, and its early best-seller was Jean Plaidy's Beyond the Blue Mountain.
In 1957 Harlequin took the North American rights to Mills & Boon's romances, and by 1964 it was publishing only Mills & Boon novels under its own name. It bought Mills & Boon outright on 1 October 1971. Harlequin Presents followed in 1973, and in 1975 the firm bought its first novel by an American author, Janet Dailey.
Torstar took a majority stake in late 1975 and full ownership in 1981. Harlequin bought its American rival Silhouette in 1984, launched the MIRA imprint for single-title novels in 1994, and was sold to News Corp in 2014, since when it has sat within HarperCollins.
Holding a copy? The first edition checker shows Harlequin's practice for the year on your title page.
Identification
How to identify Harlequin first editions
What to look for
The single most useful fact: Harlequin began as a paperback reprint house. For almost all of its first two decades, a Harlequin copy is a later reissue of a text first published by someone else.
1940s to 1950s
The early list was built on reprint rights to novels already published elsewhere, including Agatha Christie and Arthur Conan Doyle. A Harlequin Christie or Doyle is an early Canadian paperback, collected as such, not a first edition of the text.
First printings of early Harlequins are collected in their own right: the University of Alberta holds more than 500 first-edition Harlequins from 1949 to 1980.
1950s to 1960s
From 1957 Harlequin reprinted Mills & Boon romances for North America, and within a few years they made up most of its list. For these titles the London Mills & Boon edition came first; the Harlequin paperback is the North American issue.
From 1970
Where a book carries a number line, the lowest number present gives the printing; a line that includes 1 marks a first printing.
The single most useful fact: Harlequin began as a paperback reprint house. For almost all of its first two decades, a Harlequin copy is a later reissue of a text first published by someone else. 1940s to 1950s - The early list was built on reprint rights to novels already published elsewhere, including Agatha Christie and Arthur Conan Doyle. A Harlequin Christie or Doyle is an early Canadian paper
How many Harlequin books does MyVolumes track?
We track 1,746 editions published by Harlequin, 2 of them first editions, across 1,744 books.
