[5][6] In 1971, Harlequin purchased the London-based publisher Mills & Boon Limited and began a global expansion program opening offices in Australia and major European markets such as Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Greece, Netherlands, and Scandinavia.

[10] The business would be owned by Advocate Printers, Doug Weld of Bryant Press, and Jack Palmer, head of the Canadian distributor of the Saturday Evening Post and the Ladies' Home Journal.

[10] Among the novels they reprinted were works by James Hadley Chase, Agatha Christie, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and Somerset Maugham.

[10] In 1954, the company's chief editor died, and Bonnycastle's wife, Mary, began proofreading books at home and took over his duties.

[14] Mary Bonnycastle and her daughter Judy Burgess exercised editorial control over which Mills & Boon novels were reprinted by Harlequin.

[13] The romances proved to be hugely popular, and by 1964 the company was exclusively publishing Mills & Boon novels under the Harlequin imprint.

[16] 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%.

He immediately organized the 1969 relocation of operations to Toronto, Ontario, where he built the company into a major force in the publishing industry.

[2] In 1970, Bonnycastle Jr. contracted with Pocket Books and Simon & Schuster to distribute Harlequin romance fiction novels in the United States.

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.

[14] As North American booksellers were reluctant to stock mass-market paperbacks, Harlequin chose to sell its books "where the women are,"[18] distributing them in supermarkets, drug stores and other retail outlets.

As well as selling through retail outlets, Harlequin established a direct marketing division taking as its inspiration the systems used by Reader's Digest.

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.

[20][21] 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.

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.

[14] To fill this gap, and to take advantage of the untapped talent of the American writers Harlequin had rejected, Simon & Schuster formed Silhouette Books in 1980.

[24] 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.

[26] 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.

[28] 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.

[32] Torstar Corporation, which owns Canada's largest daily newspaper, the Toronto Star, purchased Harlequin in 1981 and began actively expanding into other markets.

"[34] Harlequin began expanding into other parts of Europe in 1974,[35] when it entered into a distribution agreement with Cora Verlag, a division of German publisher Axel Springer AG.

[37] 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.

Cora Verlag distributed over 720,000 romance novels at border checkpoints to introduce East Germans to the company's books.

Harlequin has offices in Amsterdam, Athens, Budapest, Granges-Pacot, Hamburg, London, Madrid, Milan, New York, Paris, Stockholm, Sydney, Tokyo, and Warsaw as well as licensing agreements in nine other countries.

[1] Despite its profitability, and a 37.2% pay hike for Harlequin President and CEO Donna Hayes in 2011,[47] the firm's royalty program for authors is controversial.

[50] The lawsuit alleges that Harlequin deprives plaintiffs and the other authors in the class of e-book royalties due them under publishing agreements entered into between 1990 and 2004.

[83] Kimani Press, which focuses on African-American protagonists, was formed by Harlequin in December 2005, with the purchase of the Arabesque, Sepia, and New Spirit Imprints from BET Books.

To retain their top talent, in October 1994 Harlequin launched the MIRA Books imprint to publish single-title romances.

Authors contributing to the More Than Words anthology include Diana Palmer, Debbie Macomber, Susan Wiggs, and Linda Lael Miller.