Grafton was a British paperback imprint

Imprint

In the publishing industry, an imprint can mean several different things:* As a piece of bibliographic information about a book, it refers to the name and address of the book's publisher and its date of publication as given at the foot or on the verso of its title page.* It can mean a trade name...

 established circa 1981 by Granada Publishing Ltd, a subsidiary of media company Granada Group Ltd. It was named after the publishing company's then address, 8 Grafton Street, in central London. Other paperback imprints of Granada at the time included Paladin

Paladin

The paladins, sometimes known as the Twelve Peers, were the foremost warriors of Charlemagne's court, according to the literary cycle known as the Matter of France. They first appear in the early chansons de geste such as The Song of Roland, where they represent Christian martial valor against the...

, Panther and Triad, a collaboration with hardback publishers Jonathan Cape

Jonathan Cape

Jonathan Cape was a London-based publisher founded in 1919 as "Page & Co" by Herbert Jonathan Cape , formerly a manager at Duckworth who had worked his way up from a position of bookshop errand boy. Cape brought with him the rights to cheap editions of the popular author Elinor Glyn and sales of...

, Chatto and Windus

Chatto and Windus

Chatto & Windus has been, since 1987, an imprint of Random House, publishers. It was originally an important publisher of books in London, founded in the Victorian era....

 and The Bodley Head

The Bodley Head

The Bodley Head is an English publishing house, founded in 1887 and existing as an independent entity until the 1970s. The name has been used as an imprint of Random House Children's Books since 1987...

.

In 1983 Granada Publishing Ltd was sold to the Glasgow-based publishers William Collins & Co, which used the name Grafton to consolidate all of Granada's paperback imprints alongside its own existing Fontana imprint.

Collins was in turn bought by Rupert Murdoch

Rupert Murdoch

Keith Rupert Murdoch, AC, KSG is an Australian-American business magnate. He is the founder and Chairman and CEO of , the world's second-largest media conglomerate....

's News International

News International

News International Ltd is the United Kingdom newspaper publishing division of News Corporation. Until June 2002, it was called News International plc....

 in 1989 to create the HarperCollins

HarperCollins

HarperCollins is a publishing company owned by News Corporation. It is the combination of the publishers William Collins, Sons and Co Ltd, a British company, and Harper & Row, an American company, itself the result of an earlier merger of Harper & Brothers and Row, Peterson & Company. The worldwide...

publishing conglomerate. The name Grafton disappeared as a separate brand circa 1993.