Mills & B

About Mills & B

Mills & Boon is the London publisher of romantic fiction, founded in 1908 by Gerald Rusgrove Mills and Charles Boon, and owned since 1971 by Harlequin, which is now part of HarperCollins. The two founders had met while working at Methuen and started the firm with 1,000 pounds.

Its early list was general rather than romantic: fiction, travel guides, children's and craft books, educational textbooks and even Shakespeare. Authors included Hugh Walpole, with two books in 1911 and 1912, and Jack London, whose adventure titles it issued between 1912 and 1923. In the 1930s the firm chose to concentrate on hardback romances, the line it is now known for.

The Canadian publisher Harlequin began reprinting Mills & Boon novels in North America after taking North American distribution rights in the late 1950s, and by 1964 its list consisted only of Mills & Boon titles. Harlequin bought the company outright on 1 October 1971, keeping John Boon as managing director of the British business. Torstar took a majority stake in Harlequin in 1975 and full ownership in 1981, and kept it until 2014, when it was sold to News Corp and became a division of HarperCollins. Mills & Boon, based in Richmond, London, still publishes category romance, and e-books now outsell print.