HarperCollins knows how to sell books.
The global publishing house demonstrated its skill in 2015 with its ballyhooed release of Harper Lee's second novel, "Go Set a Watchman," published more than 50 years after her debut effort, "To Kill a Mockingbird." The new novel promptly sold 1.6 million copies.
If the New York-based publishing house has mad skills, it’s also had 200 years of practice. Harper’s first book, an English translation of Seneca’s Morals, came out in 1817 (published by J. & J. Harper, Printers). The publishing house has brought the world Herman Melville, Mark Twain, the Brontë sisters, Thackeray, Dickens, Maurice Sendak, Margaret Wise Brown (“Goodnight Moon”) and the Bible. (It has also swallowed up many other publishing houses, merging with William Collins Ltd. in 1990 to become HarperCollins.)
To celebrate its 200th birthday, HarperCollins is highlighting 200 books from among the thousands in its catalog. (The company publishes 10,000 new books every year in 17 languages and has a print and digital catalog of more than 200,000 titles.)
A fascinating web portal, 200.hc.com, gives a thumbnail portrait of each of these books, hosts recordings of authors reading their prose, offers a gallery of photographic artifacts, including personal letters from authors and book proposals written on candy packages and cigarette boxes, and has interviews with authors on the topic "Why I read."
The criteria for the 200 books that were selected were simple: “Books that have inspired, informed, entertained and also endured,” said Erin Crum, vice president of corporate communications.
These include, not surprisingly, several classics of Southern literature, such as “To Kill a Mockingbird,” “Black Boy” by Richard Wright, “Stride Toward Freedom” by Martin Luther King Jr., “Peace With God” by Billy Graham and “Poisonwood Bible” by Kentuckian Barbara Kingsolver.
Jonathan Burnham, publisher and senior vice president, spoke recently about the history of HarperCollins, its relation with Southern writers, and the future of publishing.
Of Southern literature, he said, “If you look at the totality of American literature, going back to Mark Twain, the Southern strain, however you define it, is a huge part of it. … Many of the most influential writers of the 19th and 20th and 21st century are Southerners.”
Will the genre endure? “The South is changing,” Burnham said. “It is less deeply American, in an historical way. It is more industrialized, less recognizably separate. Starbucks are everywhere, and so on.”
But, he said, the influence of Southern writers is unlikely to disappear.
Paper, as a medium, is also likely to endure, Burnham said. He doesn’t see e-books replacing the printed variety. “There have been periods in the last 10 years when publishers began to think paper would decline in a serious way. But it shows no signs of going away. It’s incredibly durable and reliable. And it’s interesting: A lot of younger readers seem to be a large part of the demographic for print, rather than digital. There’s room for both.”
What sort of response did he have to seeing the HarperCollins history spread out before him? “I was heartened, as a publisher, by the exciting mix of what you might define as commercial, such as a writer like Tom Clancy, and the literary, like Gabriel Garcia Marquez. In any great publishing house, you must have an interesting mix of books that feed different tastes and different streams.”
Any surprises after looking over the list? Yes, Burnham said. The Briton works in the adult division, and was shocked at how many classics of children’s literature — “Stuart Little,” “Goodnight Moon,” “Where the Wild Things Are,” “Charlotte’s Web” — came out under his imprint. “It’s an extraordinary list.”
Here are a few of the “Southern” books highlighted by HarperCollins on the HarperCollins 200 website:
“Black Boy,” Richard Wright, 1945
“Richard Wright’s powerful account of his journey from innocence to experience in the Jim Crow South. It is at once an unashamed confession and a profound indictment — a poignant and disturbing record of social injustice and human suffering.”
“Stride Toward Freedom,” Martin Luther King Jr., 1958
“Civil rights leader and Nobel Peace Prize winner Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s remarkable telling of the Montgomery bus boycott, the first successful demonstration of nonviolent resistance in America. It was lauded by both the general public and literary critics.”
“Their Eyes Were Watching God,” Zora Neale Hurston, 1937
“(P)erhaps the most widely read and highly acclaimed novel in the canon of African-American literature and one of the most important books of the twentieth century.”
“To Kill a Mockingbird,” Harper Lee, 1960
“One of the most beloved classics of all time, ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ has earned many distinctions: it won the Pulitzer Prize, has been translated into more than forty languages, has sold more than 40 million copies worldwide, and was made into an Academy Award-winning motion picture.”
“Bel Canto,” Ann Patchett, 2001
Californian Ann Patchett settled in Nashville, Tenn., where she owns Parnassus Books, so we accept her as our own. “Bel Canto,” the tale of an opera star and a South American kidnapping, “won both the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Orange Prize in 2002. It was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and was named the Book Sense Book of the Year.”
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