Newsstand: 1925: The Bookman

Context | View Contents | View Magazine

 

a virtual newsstand from the summer of 1925

Overview

“I am a Bookman” James Russell Lowe

 

           The Bookman was a conservative standard of literary taste and culture for four decades. Founded in 1895, The Bookman established its reputation as “the busy man’s literary journal” by providing expansive coverage of the world of literature and publishing. The Bookman offered the latest publishing industry gossip, biographical sketches of new and known authors, reviews of new books, critical literary articles, library news, and news for the rare book collector and ardent bibliophile; basically, everything that discerning “Bookbuyers, Bookreaders, and Booksellers” might possibly want to know.[1]

 

Beginnings

 

           In the last decade of the nineteenth century, a critical literary tradition was establishing itself, and publishing companies were happily furnishing the matrix in which an American literary culture could flourish. The initial critical grumblings over the idea of an American literature had eventually given way to acceptance.[2] As the century drew to a close, the advances in publishing technologies, the advent of advertising, and a growing middle class with leisure time fostered a magazine boom in the 1890s. This boom was a boon to the book publishing trade, which included the authors, editors, publishers, printers, academics, intellectuals, and a myriad of others who fulfilled America’s desire to read.[3]

           In 1895, Frank H. Dodd, of Dodd, Mead, and Company, recognized a need for a magazine that could satisfy a reading American public with the latest news of the literary world and collaborated with William Robertson Nicoll to create the American Bookman. Nicoll was the impetus behind the British magazine The Bookman, which he edited from 1891 – 1923.[4] He contributed the “London Letter” to the American Bookman until 1899 as well as other sketches and articles, occasionally under the pen name Claudius Clear.

           The first number of The Bookman consisted of seventy-two quarto pages and sold for fifteen cents.[5] It contained twenty-four pages of advertising, twenty pages of formal book reviews, a six-page article on Nicoll, and a plethora of industry news and gossip. Many of the sections and features that appeared in the first number underwent changes in content and titles over the years. Often a section dropped by a previous editor was brought back by another editor at a later date. The Bookman was the first American magazine to publish a best-seller list. From its model the London Bookman, the American Bookman borrowed a feature that listed new books sales “in order of demand” for nineteen American cities.[6] This feature of the magazine continued with some adaptations until the July 1918 (47.5) issue.[7]

           What The Bookman’s first number did not contain was fiction. The first fiction story published was Scottish author Ian Mclaren’s “Kate Carnegie” in 1896. Although The Bookman was heavily invested in an American literary tradition, the magazine maintained a continental perspective. British, Scottish, and other continental authors contributed articles, sketches, and reviews as well as being reviewed themselves.

 

Early Years

 

           Dr. Harry Thurston Peck, Anthon Professor of Latin and Language at Columbia College, held the first and longest editorship of The Bookman. His “junior” editor James Macarthur also worked as a literary advisor to Dodd, Mead, and Company. Peck, who was editor for twelve years, has been described as being the “literary and editorial genius” behind the early success of The Bookman (Mott 432).

           Around the turn of the century, Arthur Bartlett (A.B.) Maurice replaced Macarthur as the “junior” editor, and Peck left The Bookman in 1907. During their shared editorship, 1899-1907, circulation of the magazine exceeded forty thousand, which marks the magazine’s peak in distribution and advertising (Mott 436). The cascading financial stringencies of the Panic of 1907 seem to have seriously affected the financial stability of The Bookman, and by 1912, its reported circulation fell to twenty thousand. Maurice, who replaced Peck as editor, resigned in 1916, and G. G. Wyant assumed the editor’s position. It was during Wyant’s editorship that the George H. Doran Company bought The Bookman.

           George H. Doran learned the publishing trade by working in evangelical publishing firms from Canada to Chicago, and eventually New York.[8] In 1908, Doran opened his own publishing company with the help of one private backer and the additional support of the English publishing company Hoddard & Stoughton, publisher of the British version of The Bookman. When Dodd, Mead, and Company put The Bookman up for sale Doran was eager to acquire it. He confesses to having always eyed the magazine somewhat covetously, partly because of its association with his idol William Robertson Nicoll, whom he described as “master of the adequate word” (Doran 72). Doran also confesses that he “bought [The Bookman] knowing it was a losing property with a relatively small list of subscribers” not only because of its association with Nicoll, but also for “the inherent benefits to be derived” from ownership of the magazine (343). As a publishing man, Doran recognized the sensibility of publishing a magazine with The Bookman’s tradition and reputation when it came to advertising the products of his industry. Ultimately, however, during the ten years that the George H. Doran Company published The Bookman “it cost from ledger figures just about $100,000” which Doran dryly notes was “a great deal of money” (343). Doran also notes, though, that the “indirect benefits” of publishing the magazine “partially offset this loss – and I have no regrets, for I am prouder of those ten volumes of The Bookman than of any other part of my publishing effort” (343).

           Doran and the editor for his publishing house, Eugene F. Saxton, chose Robert Cortes (Bob) Holliday to take editorial charge of The Bookman. Holliday, whom Doran describes as “a grand fellow, but totally unorganized,” resigned in 1920 (343).

 

The Bookman in the 1920s

 

           After Holliday, Henry Litchfield West was editor for one year (Mott 432); however, Doran does not mention him in his memoir. Doran does say that he felt The Bookman “was drifting” as 1920 approached (Doran 344). To combat that lack of direction he decided to separate the magazine from his book publishing operations and place it under an editor “who would be solely responsible for its contents,” and he hired John Chipman Farrar (344). Like Peck, Farrar was also a distinguished Yale graduate; his poetry is featured in the first Yale Series of Younger Poets (1920). Farrar had served in World War I and was “not more than twenty-four” when he took over editorship of The Bookman (344).

           Under Farrar, who was editor from 1921 until 1927, the magazine’s critical reputation grew and its circulation increased from “no more than twelve thousand,” but “never quite reached twenty thousand” (Mott 438-440). The Bookman’s target audience included white, college educated, conservative, and literary minded individuals. With Farrar as editor, Mott describes the magazine as being “a kind of working guide to the current literary movements” (438).

           The 1920s abounded with literary movements that were being hammered out in a wide circle of conversations between current magazines. In 1925, many critical debates centered on the New Humanists, led by Irving Babbitt, a Harvard Professor of Romantic Literature, and Peter More, a Princeton University Professor of Classical Literature.[9] The New Humanist movement favored a return to a neoclassical literary standard, worried over the declining standards and taste in American culture, and “declared war on the dominant assumptions of modernism” (Lora and Longton 8). And this war was fought in magazines such as The Bookman, Eliot’s Criterion, and Mencken’s American Mercury, just to name a few.

           By 1927, “it became more and more obvious that it was possible to publish The Bookman only at a financial loss far in excess of compensating benefits” (Doran 345). The George H. Doran Company sold the magazine to The Bookman Publishing Company, formed by Seward Collins, “a literary man of independent fortune” (Mott 440); Collins was also associated with the Algonquin Round Table, a New York social circle of literary figures, and a prodigious bibliophile.[10]  When The Bookman became available, he bought it and hired Burton Rascoe as editor.

           Rascoe was The Bookman’s least conservative editor. And although he published more new fiction than any other editor, he did not ignore the more conventional, established authors. Also, in 1928 the magazine began reprinting what was judged to be “the best pieces of reporting published in American papers” (Mott 441). About this time, Collins took over the editorial position, and the magazine returned to a more conservative editorial stance. Collins was a recent subscriber to the New Humanist Movement, and he states in a letter his desire to make The Bookman “the place where the representatives of this tendency addressed the world at large” (qtd in Tucker 94).

           Whether or not Collins shaped The Bookman into a party organ for the New Humanist movement is a matter of debate. There was a steady decrease in the amount of advertising after 1928, and by the final number of the magazine there are six pages numbered as advertising. Of those six pages, two are the Table of Contents and one is a checklist of new books. Also, Collins missed two issues in 1932 (Tucker 95). So obviously there were financial issues, which is not exactly surprising in the wake of the Depression. Also, the New Humanist movement lost the war that it waged on Modernism. Whatever his reasons, Collins announced the end of The Bookman in 1933 and immediately began publication of The American Review.

           As a conservative estimate, The Bookman reviewed over five thousand books during its thirty eight year run. This estimate does not include informal reviews or mentions in critical articles and sketches of notable literary figures, some of whom have faded from critical attention over the years for various reasons. Without shunning controversy or minimizing its high standards of intellectualism and taste, The Bookman participated in larger conversations that helped to define the material history of an American literary tradition.

—Contextualization by Andrea Johnson

 

Notes

 

[1] Quotations from The Bookman. 1.1. Ed. Peck, Harry Thurston. Dodd, Mead, and Company: New York. 1895. (iii). Web. Google Books.

[2] Gross, Robert A. “Building a National Literature: The United States 1800-1890.” A Companion to the History of the Book. Eds. Eliot, Simon and Jonathan Rose. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2007. 315-328. Web. Gross discusses how the notion of an American literary tradition began to come into being as American publishers recognized the economic advantages of publishing new books from Americans over their standard practice of reprinting what was popular in England. Gross credits Boston publisher with the insight to market authors such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Ralph Waldo Emerson as classic American authors.

[3] Peterson, Theodore. “The Birth of the Modern Magazine.” Magazines in the Twentieth Century. Urbana: The University of Illinois Press, 1956. 1-17. Web. Modernist Journals Project. Peterson discusses in depth the phenomenal increase in magazine publishing during the last decade of the nineteenth century and the social, cultural, and historical events surrounding that increase.

[4] Prance, Claude A. “The Bookman.” British Literary Magazines: The Victorian and Edwardian Age, 1837 – 1913. Ed. Alvin Sullivan. Greenwood Press: Westport, Conn., 1984. 43-49. Print. The monthly British magazine ran from 1891 until 1925 when it merged with The London Mercury. In 1939, the London Mercury merged with Life & Letters which ran until 1946. Nicoll was also the Editor of the British Weekly and a literary advisor to the English publishers Hoddard & Stoughton.

[5] Mott, Frank Luther. “The Bookman.”  A History of American Magazines. Vol. IV. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1938. Print.

[6] Mott gives the number of cities as sixteen (435). Twenty listings are given, but “New York, Uptown” and New York, Downtown” are not counted here as separate cities.

[7] In the November 1897 issue (6.3) a listing of the top six “Best Selling Books,” as calculated from the reporting cities was added. This addition continued until 1918 as well. Although included as a part of “The Book Mart” section, the list-by-city of “in-demand” books became “The Book Mart” section in the March 1814 issue (39.1), and in the 13 October 1913 issue (38.2) a weekly account of the top six “books most in demand, excluding fiction” as reported by the New York Public Library Circulation Department was also added to the section.  In March 1916 (43.1), the library listings are discontinued. They return in the March 1919 issue (49.1) as “The Bookman’s Monthly Score,” which contained regional listings for the top six books charged at a selection of two hundred public libraries. This listing continues, somewhat intermittently after 1927, until the magazine closes in 1933.

[8] Doran, George H. Chronicles of Barabbas (1884 – 1934). New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1935. Print.

[9] The Conservative Press in Twentieth-Century America. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1999. Print. Lora and Henry Longton provide a concise description of the New Humanists’ uneasiness over the consumerist culture evolving from capitalism and Progressive Era democracy

[10] And Then They Loved Him: Seward Collins and the Chimera of an American Facism.  New York: Peter Lang, 2006. Print.

 

Works Cited

 

The Bookman 1.1 (1895): iii. Google Books. Web.

Doran, George H. Chronicles of Barabbas (1884 – 1934). New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1935. Print.

Lora, Ronald and William Henry Longton. The Conservative Press in the Twentieth Century. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1999. Print.

Mott, Frank L. “The Bookman.” A History of American Magazines. Vol. IV. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1938. 432 – 431. Print.

Peterson, Theodore. “The Birth of the Modern Magazine.” Magazines in the Twentieth Century. 2^nd ed. Urbana: The University of Illinois Press, 1964. 1 - 17. Print.

Prance, Claude A. “The Bookman.” British Literary Magazines: The Victorian and Edwardian Age, 1837 – 1913. Ed. Alvin Sullivan. Greenwood Press: Westport, Conn., 1984. 43-49. Print.

Tucker, Michael Jay. And Then They Loved Him: Seward Collins & the Chimera of an American Fascism. New York: Peter Lang, 2006. 432 – 441. Print

 

click cover for magazine

July 1925