Sphere

About Sphere

Sphere is a British imprint of Little, Brown Book Group, part of Hachette UK, and carries the name of Sphere Books, the London paperback publisher the Thomson Corporation launched in 1966.

The original Sphere was a mass-market paperback house. Its lists included UK editions of Robert E. Howard's Conan stories, the Dennis Wheatley Library of the Occult and, in the 1970s, a run of Sphere Science Fiction Classics. In 1976 it paid $225,000 to Ballantine Books for the British rights to the Star Wars novelisation, whose first printing sold out. Pearson bought Sphere in 1985 and placed it within Penguin. Macdonald & Co. acquired it in 1989, moving the science fiction and fantasy list to Orbit and general titles to Futura, and the Sphere name was retired in 1990.

The name is now used by an imprint of Little, Brown, which belonged to Time Warner Book Group until Hachette bought the group in 2006. Today's Sphere publishes commercial fiction and popular non-fiction by authors including Patricia Cornwell, Mark Billingham, Jenny Colgan, Mitch Albom, Nicholas Sparks and Nicholas Evans.

Sphere first published The Cuckoo's Calling on 4 April 2013 under the pen name Robert Galbraith. In July 2013 The Sunday Times revealed that the crime novel was by J. K. Rowling.