Harper

About Harper

Harper is the flagship adult imprint of HarperCollins in New York, the descendant of the printing business that brothers James and John Harper started in New York City in 1817.

The firm traded as J. & J. Harper until 1833, when their brothers Joseph Wesley and Fletcher Harper became partners and the name changed to Harper & Brothers. The firm went on to launch Harper's New Monthly Magazine (1850), Harper's Weekly and Harper's Bazar. Harper & Brothers issued the first American edition of Herman Melville's Moby-Dick; or, The Whale in New York on 14 November 1851, a month after the London edition, and in 1947 it published Margaret Wise Brown's Goodnight Moon.

In 1962 Harper & Brothers merged with Row, Peterson & Company to become Harper & Row. Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation bought Harper & Row in March 1987, became sole owner of the British publisher William Collins, Sons in 1989 and merged the two firms as HarperCollins. The plain Harper name has been used for the main adult imprint since 2007, and HarperCollins remains owned by News Corp.

How to spot a Harper first edition

• From 1912 Harper & Brothers printed a two-letter code below the copyright notice giving the month and year of printing: the first letter is the month (A for January to M for December, skipping J) and the second is the year, starting with M for 1912.
• The year letters ran out with L for 1936 and began again with M for 1937, so a code such as "D-Y" can mean 1924 or 1949 and the book itself must settle which; a first printing of Benjamin Graham's The Intelligent Investor (1949) carries "D-Y", April 1949.
• The code records when that copy was printed, not the copyright year, so a later printing can carry the original copyright date with a later code: a Brave New World dated 1932 on the copyright page but coded "H-S" was printed in August 1943.