William Collins

About William Collins

William Collins is the name of the Glasgow publishing house founded in 1819 by the schoolmaster William Collins with Charles Chalmers, which became Agatha Christie's publisher and later merged with Harper & Row to form HarperCollins; since 2013 it has also been the name of HarperCollins UK's main non-fiction imprint.

The firm's first book, Thomas Chalmers's The Christian and Civic Economy of Large Towns, appeared in September 1819. Collins grew on religious and educational publishing: it gained a licence to print the Bible in 1839, issued its first dictionary in 1824 and its first atlas in 1856, and took the name William Collins, Sons & Co. in 1868. It began publishing fiction in 1917 under Sir Godfrey Collins.

In 1926 Collins published Christie's The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, beginning a long relationship: Collins went on to publish all but the first six of her novels, many under its Collins Crime Club label (1930 to 1994). It also published Rex Stout in Britain and launched Fontana paperbacks in 1953. News Corporation bought a 40% stake in 1981 and then full control in the late 1980s, and in 1990 Collins merged with Harper & Row to form HarperCollins.

In February 2013 HarperCollins combined HarperPress with parts of the Collins non-fiction list to create a new William Collins imprint.

How to spot a William Collins first edition

• Collins told H. S. Boutell that it used no special method of marking first editions or first impressions.
• When Collins issued a cheaper edition, the reverse of the title page recorded both the original publication date and the date of the cheap edition.