Mills and Boon Partnership
The contract with Mills and Boon was based solely on a handshake, given each year when Bonnycastle visited London. He would lunch at the Ritz Hotel with Alan Boon, the son of a Mills and Boon founder, and 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 and Boon novels were reprinted by Harlequin. They had a "decency code" and rejected more sexually explicit material that Mills and Boon submitted for reprinting. Upon realizing that the genre was popular, Richard Bonnycastle 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.
The romances proved to be hugely popular, and by 1964 the company was exclusively publishing Mills and Boon novels. Although Harlequin had the rights to distribute the Mills and 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 would build the company into a major force in the publishing industry. In 1970, Bonnycastle, Jr. contracted with Pocket Books and Simon and Schuster to distribute the Mills and Boon novels in the United States.
On October 1, 1971, Harlequin purchased Mills and Boon. John Boon, another founder's son, remained with the company, overseeing British operations. North American booksellers were reluctant to stock mass market paperbacks, Harlequin chose to sell their books "where the women are", distributing them in supermarkets and other retail stores. The company focuses on selling the line of books, rather than individual titles. Rather than traditional advertising, the company focused on giveaways. A sampling of books within a line would be given away, sometimes in conjunction with other products, in the hopes that readers would continue to buy books within that line. Harlequin then began a reader service, selling directly to readers who agreed to purchase a certain number of books each month.
At the time that Harlequin purchased Mills and Boon, the company published only one line of category romances. Six novels were released each month in this line, known as Harlequin Romance. At the urging of John Boon, in 1973 Harlequin introduced a second line, Harlequin Presents. Designed partially to highlight three popular and prolific authors, Violet Winspear, Anne Hampson, and Anne Mather, these novels were slightly more sensual than their Harlequin Romance counterparts. Although Mary Bonnycastle disapproved of the more sensual nature of these novels, they had sold well in Great Britain, and the company chose to distribute them in North America as well. Within two years the Harlequin Presents novels were outselling Harlequin Romance.
In late 1975, Toronto Star Ltd. acquired a 52.5 percent interest in Harlequin and in 1981 acquired the balance of the shares. .
Read more about this topic: Harlequin Enterprises
Famous quotes containing the words mills and, mills, boon and/or partnership:
“They give us a pair of cloth shorts twice a year for all our clothing. When we work in the sugar mills and catch our finger in the millstone, they cut off our hand; when we try to run away, they cut off our leg: both things have happened to me. It is at this price that you eat sugar in Europe.”
—Voltaire [François Marie Arouet] (1694–1778)
“Commercial jazz, soap opera, pulp fiction, comic strips, the movies set the images, mannerisms, standards, and aims of the urban masses. In one way or another, everyone is equal before these cultural machines; like technology itself, the mass media are nearly universal in their incidence and appeal. They are a kind of common denominator, a kind of scheme for pre-scheduled, mass emotions.”
—C. Wright Mills (1916–62)
“I too mean to be out of politics. The ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment gives me the boon of equality before the law, terminates my enlistment, and discharges me cured.”
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)
“Nevertheless, no school can work well for children if parents and teachers do not act in partnership on behalf of the children’s best interests. Parents have every right to understand what is happening to their children at school, and teachers have the responsibility to share that information without prejudicial judgment.... Such communication, which can only be in a child’s interest, is not possible without mutual trust between parent and teacher.”
—Dorothy H. Cohen (20th century)