Early years Harlequin was founded in 1949 by
Richard Bonnycastle in
Winnipeg, Manitoba, as a paperback reprinting company. He founded the business while working at Winnipeg's Advocate Printers, a branch of Toronto's Bryant Press, as a way to keep the presses busy. Harlequin released its first book, Nancy Bruff's
The Manatee, in May 1949. Although the new company had strong sales in its nascent years,
profit margins were limited, and the operation struggled to stay solvent. Following the death of Palmer in the mid-1950s, Bonnycastle acquired his 25% interest in Harlequin. With the company still struggling to survive, soon Weld departed and Bonnycastle, now in full control, transferred Weld's shares to secretary Ruth Palmour. The first Mills & Boon novel to be reprinted by Harlequin was Anne Vinton's
The Hospital in Buwambo (Mills & Boon No 407).
Mills & Boon partnership The contract with Mills & Boon was based solely on a handshake, given each year when Richard Bonnycastle visited London. He would lunch at the
Ritz Hotel with Editorial Director Alan Boon, the son of Gerald Mills, co-founder of Mills & Boon. The two would informally agree to extend their business agreement for an additional year. Mary Bonnycastle and her daughter Judy Burgess exercised editorial control over which Mills & Boon novels were reprinted by Harlequin. They had a "decency code" and rejected more sexually-explicit material that Mills & Boon submitted for reprinting. Upon realizing the genre was popular, Richard finally decided to read a romance novel. He chose one of the more explicit novels and enjoyed it. On his orders, the company conducted a
market test with the novel he had read and discovered that it outsold a similar, tamer novel. Overall, intimacy in the novels never extended beyond a chaste kiss between the protagonists. Although Harlequin had the rights to distribute the Mills & Boon books throughout North America, in 1967 over 78% of their sales took place in Canada, where the
sell-through rate was approximately 85%. Richard Bonnycastle died in 1968 and his son,
Richard Bonnycastle Jr., took over the company. He immediately organized the 1969 relocation of operations to
Toronto,
Ontario, where he built the company into a major force in the publishing industry. This move was made primarily to secure the talents of Alan Boon and his editorial team. John Boon, another of the co-founder's sons, remained with the company as Managing Director overseeing British operations and English language exports to markets around the world, including Australia, India and South Africa. distributing them in supermarkets, drug stores and other retail outlets.
Romance wars By 1975, 70% of Harlequin's sales came from the United States. Dailey's novels provided the romance genre's "first look at heroines, heroes and courtships that take place in America, with American sensibilities, assumptions, history, and most of all, settings." Harlequin was unsure how the market would react to this new type of romance, and was unwilling to fully embrace it. In the late 1970s, a Harlequin editor rejected a manuscript by
Nora Roberts, who has since become the top-selling romance author, because "they already had their American writer." Harlequin terminated its distribution contract with
Simon & Schuster and
Pocket Books in 1976. This left Simon & Schuster with a large sales force and no product. Silhouette published several lines of category romance, and encouraged their writers to experiment within the genre, creating new kinds of heroes and heroines and addressing contemporary social issues. Realizing their mistake, Harlequin launched their own line of America-focused romances in 1980. The
Harlequin Superromance line was the first of its lines to originate in North America instead of in Britain. The novels were similar to the Harlequin Presents books, but were longer and featured American settings and American characters. Harlequin had also failed to adapt quickly to the signs that readers appreciated novels with more explicit sex scenes, and in 1980 several publishers entered the category romance market to fill that gap. That year
Dell launched Candlelight Ecstasy, the first line to waive the requirement that heroines be virginal. By the end of 1983, sales for the Candlelight Ecstasy line totaled $30 million. Silhouette also launched similar lines, Desire and Special Edition, each of which had a 90–100% sellout rate each month. The sudden increase in category romance lines meant an equally sudden increase in demand for writers of the new style of romance novel. By 1984, the market was saturated with category lines and readers had begun to complain of redundancy in plots. The following year, the "dampening effect of the high level of redundancy associated with series romances was evident in the decreased number of titles being read per month." Harlequin's return rate, which had been less than 25% in 1978 when it was the primary provider of category romance, swelled to 60%. In 1984, Harlequin purchased Silhouette from Simon & Schuster. Despite the acquisition, Silhouette continued to retain editorial control and to publish various lines under their own imprint.
International expansion Torstar Corporation, which owns Canada's largest daily newspaper, the
Toronto Star, purchased Harlequin in 1981 and began actively expanding into other markets. Although the authors of Harlequin novels universally share English as a first language, each Harlequin office functions independently in deciding which books to publish, edit, translate, and print, "to ensure maximum adaptability to the particulars of their respective markets." Harlequin began expanding into other parts of Europe in 1974, when it entered into a distribution agreement with Cora Verlag, a division of German publisher
Axel Springer AG. The companies signed a two-year agreement to release two Mills & Boon novels each month in magazine format. The books sold well, and when the agreement came up for renewal Harlequin instead purchased a 50% interest in Cora Verlag. The new
joint venture format allowed Harlequin to receive more of the profits, and allowed them to gain continued distribution in
Austria,
Switzerland, and
West Germany. As of 1998, Germany represented 40% of Harlequin's total European business. During this same period, Harlequin opened an office in the
Netherlands. Although this office lost money in its first year, by its third year in business it had accumulated a profit. In 1979, the company expanded in
Scandinavia with an office in
Stockholm. Scandinavia offered unique problems however, as booksellers refused to sell the category romances, complaining that the books' short life span of one month created too much work for too little compensation. Booksellers and distributors also worried that the uniformity of Harlequin's book covers made advertising too difficult. Instead, Harlequin novels in Scandinavia are classified as magazines and sold in supermarkets, at newsstands, or through subscription. Harlequin retains their North American-style
direct marketing. Its message in Scandinavia is very similar to that of North America, but its target audience differs slightly. The 1989
fall of the Berlin Wall gave Harlequin an opportunity to extend into previously closed markets. Cora Verlag distributed over 720,000 romance novels at border checkpoints to introduce
East Germans to the company's books. The same year, Harlequin's German joint venture began distributing books in
Hungary. By 1991 the company was selling 7 million romances in Hungary, and by 1992 Harlequin had sold 11 million books in a nation which, at the time, contained only 5.5 million women. At the same time, Harlequin's wholly owned subsidiary in
Poland was able to order initial print runs of 174,000 copies of each title, and the
Czech Republic was purchasing over $10 million in Harlequin novels each year. In 1992, Harlequin had its best year (as of 1998), selling over 205 million novels in 24 languages on 6 continents. The company released a total of 800 new titles in English, with 6,600 foreign editions. Harlequin moved into the
Chinese market in January 1995. In China, the company produced books in both
Mandarin and English. Twenty titles were offered each year in Mandarin, with print runs of 550,000 copies each. An additional ten titles were offered in English, with print runs of 200,000 copies each. == International editions ==